Game: A Tiny Sticker Tale
Genre: Adventure, Lifestyle, Puzzle, Indie
System: Nintendo Switch (Also on Steam (Windows, MacOS, Linux))
Developer | Publisher: Ogre Pixel
Age Rating: US Everyone | EU 3+
Price: US $9.99 | UK £8.99 | EU € 9,99
Release Date: October 4th, 2023
Review code used, with many thanks to Stride PR.
Funded in less than 2 hours via a Kickstarter campaign, A Tiny Sticker Tale is the latest release from Ogre Pixel.
Will I be giving this game a gold star? Or will it be a sticky mess?
What Tiny Sticker Tale Awaits?
You play as Flynn, an adorable donkey who finds himself travelling to Figori Island. The opening cut-scene shows Flynn’s book sparkling, almost as if it’s magical. What secrets does this book contain?
The island is made up of jigsaw-like pieces. However, the only exit in the beginning area is blocked with two wooden boxes. Luckily, there is a friendly-looking bird called Honey, who gives you some advice: move the boxes blocking the way by turning them into stickers. The controls to do this appear on-screen, and you can easily move the boxes and proceed.
As you move to the next square, you see the outline on the floor, which looks a bit like Honey. Although it seems a little weird to convert a character, you have to return to Honey and turn her into a sticker. Placing her in the magical sticker book to be able to carry her to the needed place. When you transform her back, she will give you some more advice as to how to proceed.
Moving forward, a cut scene shows a mischievous raccoon moving all the trees to the edge of the area and an upset character. Talking to Dusty by the campfire, you learn that they love trees, and would like the area filled with five trees. So you’ll need to hunt around other areas to get two additional trees.
At this point, you have more freedom within A Tiny Sticker Tale. You might head off and explore the island, or you might finish Dusty’s request and see where that leads. The choice is yours! There is no mission log to refer back to, so I found it easier to stick with one task.
No Tiny Ending For This Sticker Tale
The main objective in A Tiny Sticker Tale is to collect five medallions. Each of these represents a trait and demonstrates your ability to help. It took about three hours to complete my first playthrough but only 45 minutes on a focused ‘main objective only’ second run.
However, there are other quests and challenges. You can play tennis with Rocky or find Coronya’s sisters. Maybe you want to find the goddess, dig up some treasure or simply redecorate the island in your style.
And with 22 delightful pages of a collection book to fill, there is a lot packed into A Tiny Sticker Tale, with around 4-6 hours for a completist’s playthrough.
Gameplay
The controls are very straightforward and are displayed on-screen in case you forget. The gameplay is smooth and works very well in both handheld and docked modes, but there is no touchscreen functionality.
The game autosaves and you can save and exit at any point via the options menu. However, there is only one save slot, so a new game will overwrite your current progress.
The music and sound effects are pleasant, the volume of which can be adjusted. It’s also possible to alter the speed of the sticker-grabbing hand.
There is no time as such in the game, but with the sun and moon stickers, you can swap between day and night as it pleases.
A slight niggle is that some of the characters’ dialogue is repetitive, especially once you have completed their task. There was also a weird moment when I completed a quest but had moved the quest giver. The game appeared to freeze, but after I’d pressed A several times to read through invisible text, I could continue on my journey.
Conclusion
A Tiny Sticker Tale is one of the most adorable games I’ve played this year. The graphics are bold and colourful, removing and placing stickers is good fun, and the quests are satisfying.
Designed to be a short adventure, A Tiny Sticker Tale packs a lot in and definitely a game to get stuck into!
Final Verdict: Two Thumbs Up 