Sometimes you need a nice and relaxing game whose only job is to make you feel happy while playing and maybe manage to bring a tear to your eye in unexpected ways wouldn’t hurt either. A Tiny Sticker Tale from the fine folks over at Ogre Pixel is one such title that was a pure joy to play with its fun sticker mechanic while hitting you hard with a simple story that has a heart-tugging end.
A Tiny Sticker Tale is a very simple game at its core. Our main character ends up on an island and is working to track down his father who has left him a series of clues scattered throughout the island and with its inhabitants. The game is broken up into small area tiles (think of a number of puzzle pieces) that work to isolate you much like a puzzle adventure game would. Each of these tiles has open exits but also have things that you can interact with.
Perhaps you can talk with an island inhabitant about whatever is going on, or maybe you need to complete a certain task to open a new area that moves the story forward or find a tool that lets you come back later to open a new area or expand the one you’ve already explored. It’s a simple system that is easy to jump into for both young and old gamers alike. But the real magic in A Tiny Sticker Tale that makes it stand out comes from the sticker mechanic that Paper Mario: Sticker Star wishes it had thought of and used.
In A Tiny Sticker Tale, our hero of this lovely adventure comes equipped with a book that can hold stickers within. These stickers come from whatever you want to select from the world around you. If you want to grab a tree and save it, you can. The same goes for various other environmental objects and animals all over the island. But the fun part is that you can also take the various NPC characters and add them to your book as well.
This sets up some really interesting puzzles that require you to move characters to different areas so that they can help you complete various puzzles that the world requires. You can even simply move them about however you see fit. If you want the island inhabitants to all hang out together, you totally can make it happen. Every character can be moved and can set up some funny moments. But the book comes with a couple of limits.
You only get a single page to keep your stickers. Each sticker is the same size as the item you picked up, meaning that if you pick up a huge tree it’s going to take up a lot of space which means in-turn you won’t have room for other stickers. If you are overloaded, you are going to have to drop some stickers which turn back into real items/characters wherever you are. You can drop them anywhere but it’s smart to have dedicated drop areas that are close to island junction points that you open up so you don’t have to travel all across the island to find one thing you might have dropped.
And this is important as you’ll often be tasked with shuttling someone across the island, taking an item to another inhabitants, and completing puzzles that may open other parts of the island for you. With all of this you might be wondering why you would want to stuff your book full of random things that take up lots of space? Well, there exists an inhabitant that collects trees that you bring them. Every time that you bring him a new tree, he will provide you with a new piece of furniture from said tree.
But why do you need furniture? For you home of course! While you are free to decorate any island tile that you want, you will eventually get access to a tent that acts sort of like the Tardis, being bigger on the inside than the outside. You can decorate the inside however you want and with all the furniture items you can have crafted for you. It’s not as deep as something like Animal Crossing, but it makes for a nice break and helps encourage you to collect all the various types of trees on the island.
It’s clear that A Tiny Sticker Tale is full of love and that the developers put a lot of passion into everything about within what I can only assume was a small budget. It’s got a number of fun puzzles and a fair amount of extra content that you can experience even after beating the core game. It’s not a long adventure and you can most likely beat it in a single evening after a handful of hours but filling out your sticker scrapbook and completing all the extra quests do make coming back a fun time thanks to the charming world.
This is clearly a feel-good game through and through and my time spent with it, while short, was delightful and it is absolutely a game that should not be missed for those looking for a heartwarming puzzle/adventure title. I really hope that the team at Ogre Pixel sees a lot of sales from this game and that they can create a follow-up that isn’t quite so tiny and lets the potential of the sticker system really shine! Now all that’s left for me is to check out the team’s previous game (Lonesome Village) that exists in the same universe and looks equally as cute and relaxing.
A Tiny Sticker Tale is a heartwarming puzzle/adventure that is a joy from beginning to end
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