I can’t tell if the simple stripped-back style would actually appeal to kids or whether it only really works for people nostalgic for simpler times.

I doubt kids will find this appealing unless the parent's have already shielded them from the world of ipads/minecraft/roblox. It harkens back to the days of craning your neck to play an original gameboy with the table lamp in the corner of the room.

I ordered one because I'd like to build a simple game for it, my dev career started in z80 assembly building monochrome games for the TI-83+, so 100% nostalgia for me.

I've found kids complain about crappy old-fashioned options for games/movies/et c., until that's all they have available. After a day or two those "bad" options become totally fine and they're excited about them and excitedly tell you how great they are.

I grew up mostly on the NES and earlier systems, and IMO from approximately the Super Nintendo on, game system generations have all delivered about the same amount of happiness (though some individual systems were major duds, of course). It's just a matter of what you're used to. Admittedly, the frustration level of average games on the NES and other earlier systems kept them from being quite the joy-generating devices that later ones would be.

>> It harkens back to the days of craning your neck to play an original gameboy with the table lamp in the corner of the room.

Even at the time, the screen on the GameBoy was such garbage. The lack of a light didn't help either. But even with a backlight, all LCD screens were bad. I remember how washed out the Lynx and GameGear screens were.

The replacement screens you can get for them now are amazing.

It's clearly a retro throwback for an older generation who grew up with more primitive handhelds. And/or a tinkerer's toy, to see what kind of things can be done with a crank input.

If you want a cheap, simple distraction for your kid, there's a ton of used Nintendo DS units out there with an expansive library of games.

FWIW, my kids would play it for twenty minutes and then put it on the shelf.

Kids these days have access to far higher fidelity, and engaging, experiences. The novelty of a small, quirky, severely limited little device would be passing.

A bit like poking at a Tamagotchi after playing The Sims, Nintendogs and Pokemon Go for years.

Let's be frank, it was designed primarily for the latter audience. If it had been designed for kids, it would have been an app for their phone at a fraction of the price, possibly with an included dev environment. Pico-8 really kinda nailed that.