Super Adventure Hand

While everybody else was off trying to learn the Wednesday dance, I was busy focusing on the show’s most compelling character – Thing. You know, the severed hand that is constantly getting our hero out of trouble. If you’re like me and wondered what it would be like to play a game from Thing’s perspective, then let me introduce you to Super Adventure Hand, a brand-new platformer about a hand in search of his stolen arm. That’s a fun concept for a game, but is this an emphatic high-five or a big thumbs down? That’s what we’re about to find out when I review Super Adventure Hand by Devm Games.

This is the tragic story of hand and arm, two friends that are so close that they are literally attached to each other, always going places together. This annoys the evil and jealous feet, who hatch a plan to separate the two friends and kidnap arm. Now it’s up to a former hand model to brave fifty challenging stages in order to rescue the BFF and punish those nasty feet.

While the setup is a little goofy, Super Adventure Hand proves to be more than a competent 3D platformer. We walk, flick and jump around the stages with the kind of freedom one is afforded when they don’t have a big body weighing them down. Much like Thing, the hand can easily walk up walls and make daring jumps that nobody with eyes would ever want to attempt. In that sense, our hero reminds me a lot of a spider without the webbing. They are fast, agile and practically defy gravity at times.

Trust me, you’re going to need that agility if you hope to survive the fifty increasingly difficult stages. This is the kind of game where every level is some sort of platforming challenge. It starts out simple enough, with a wall you’ll need to climb, a gap you’ll need to jump over and maybe a flame or buzz saw getting in the way of that hot, delicious cup of coffee at the end of the stage. But rest assured, things get a lot trickier (and longer) from here.

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It won’t take long before we run into levels where you’ll need to complete multiple puzzles in order to open up the exit. Sometimes this means collecting a bunch of keys through harrowing platforming sections, while other times you’ll have to connect wires and turn on the power in order to get the floating platforms to move. This is the kind of game where they are constantly throwing new obstacles at you, all while using the ones they’ve introduced in new and creative ways.

We also run into a few inventive ideas that are introduced and then either immediately abandoned or used sparingly. For example, there’s a level where you don a foot disguise to confuse the enemies. This never comes into play after that one stage. There are also a couple of times where you’ll need to drive a car, which is a lot of fun despite not making a lick of sense. The game flirts with different vehicles and stealth options, but never fully commits.

Personally speaking, I love these types of platforming puzzles. I always look forward to seeing what they’ll throw at us next and how they’ll incorporate it with the rest of the obstacles. The more complicated and vexing the level designs are, the more fun I’m having. And this game delivers, especially in the second half of the adventure.

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That said, there are definitely a few gameplay decisions that I didn’t care for. For example, we’ll spend a surprising amount of time rescuing smaller hands from cages. This isn’t necessarily a bad direction to take the story, but I really hated how unpredictable the computer-controlled hands were. They are the worst at following the bigger hand around the level, and will sometimes do crazy things like fall off the level for no reason. There’s no way to guide them, so you’re always hoping for the best.

As a 3D platformer, I mostly liked the way Super Adventure Hand played. Our hero is fast and easy to control, and I like how sticky it is when dealing with walls and surfaces. You don’t have to hold any buttons to climb, which frees you up to hanging onto keys and other items. There’s an argument to be made that the hand’s jumps are a bit floaty and the physics are a little weird, but I would say that this probably helped me more than hindered, so I’ll accept it.

The real problem here comes in the form of the camera, which can be unruly at the worst possible times. You’ll be holding onto a rope and needing to make a challenging jump with pinpoint accuracy, yet the camera will be swinging around wildly, making precision nearly impossible. And do you remember how I mentioned the jumping can feel a bit floaty at times? This is made so much worse with the camera, resulting in a lot of easily preventable deaths.

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Visually, the game looks good, but is definitely lacking in style. A lot of the levels feels like they were derived from game developers looking around the office. There are a lot of filing cabinets, plants and chairs. Every level is set in the sky, always with an ominous mist below that you definitely don’t want to fall into. Worst of all, the hand’s animation is weird to the point of being off-putting. Once you notice how unsettling the finger animation is, you won’t be able to see anything else. The digits bend and stretch and flap around in extremely unnatural ways, and it’s best you don’t look directly at it.

Weird animation aside, Super Adventure Hand overcomes a lot of these issues by giving us 50 well-crafted platforming stages that are genuinely fun to play. This is a unique concept that gets the fundamentals right, leaving us with a cool genre title that will delight more than disappoint. That said, I feel like Super Adventure Hand is only scratching the surface on what you could do with this set-up. I hope we get another severed hand game that has a little more meat on the bones.