There's currently a demo for this a available in steam's big demo event thing and I have been enjoying it. What the article fails to convey is that it has a fairly robust Lua/Luau interpretor in that powers everything, so you can actually create pretty complex things. If you ever messed with PICO-8 it's pretty similar; I suggest you try it out.
The real life, physical experience may still be available.
>using tools to snip them off the plastic sprues, then connecting, painting, and even stickering them
Used to do that as a kid, with model car kits bought at the local toy and hobby store.[0]
>the kind of person who owns a soldering iron and wields it like a pro
Spent the better part of a pre-teenage summer once assembling a Heathkit[1] multi-band radio receiver -- dozens if not hundreds of resistors and capacitors to solder!
on the heathkit note i got the same feeling a few years ago soldering a QRP+ kit up. comes as mostly bare pcb and 100s of through hole components. winding all of the tuning inductors by hand and about 6 hours of soldering later i had a working 5w cw rig
