System: Switch
Release date: October 4, 2023
Developer: Ogre Pixel
Publisher: Ogre Pixel
One of my main hobbies when I was a kid was collecting stickers. They were significantly cheaper than trading cards, and getting duplicates was slightly less frustrating because I could usually find a use for them, whether that was plastering them onto anything that had an inch of space, or swapping them with my friends. A Tiny Sticker Tale, the second game from Ogre Pixel to make its way to the Switch after a successful Kickstarter campaign, takes the idea of collecting stickers and runs wild with it, letting you change the world around you by placing and removing them with some creative environmental puzzles. Although it is over far too quickly, sometimes the most pleasant experience you can have is the one that doesn’t overstay its welcome.
A Tiny Sticker Tale has the player take control of Flynn as they travel to Figori Island, searching for their father. Upon reaching the island, Flynn discovers that the sticker book from their childhood holds a magical power, allowing them to take objects from the environment and turn them into stickers. Using this strange power, Flynn must journey across the island, helping out the residents they find there, so that they might eventually meet with their father.
After introducing the basic concepts to you, the story takes a back seat, with only the occasional cutscene of one of Flynn’s childhood memories breaking up the gameplay flow. There is no central conflict or character development to speak of; outside of a troublesome raccoon named Rocky who will occasionally show up to impede your progress, any interaction with the game’s NPCs will need to be initiated by you, and despite all of them having quests, they have very little to say for themselves. Those hoping for an in-depth story won’t find it in A Tiny Sticker Tale, which puts a greater emphasis on its gameplay and exploration than it does on its narrative.
A Tiny Sticker Tale plays a lot like a traditional 2D Zelda overworld, just without the combat: you’ll travel between map squares, solving simple environmental puzzles as you go. Your general objective is to find five medallions, which you get from helping the various townspeople scattered across the land, but the game never outright tells you what to do or who will give them to you, which encourages you to talk to and help out everyone you come across. At times you’ll come across letters from your dad, who will name a particular NPC that he wants you to help, but these are the only hints that you’ll get.
The NPCs are similarly cryptic about what they want you to do for them a lot of the time, but the solution is usually obvious, and is often something that you’ve stumbled across along the way before encountering them, or will find a few map squares later. You solve puzzles and requests in A Tiny Sticker Tale with stickers, as you may have guessed. Pressing the Y button brings up Sticker Mode, which allows you to interact with various objects in the environment, picking them up and moving them around, or storing them safely inside your inventory for later use. Your inventory space is quite limited and there is a lot you can interact with in the environment, so the chances are you won’t be able to carry everything. For me this prompted an interesting minigame of inventory management as I struggled to find a way to squeeze in everything that I thought I might need in the near future, putting everything else in a place I would hopefully be able to remember. Each square of the map is uniquely designed, but it’s easy to get turned around at the beginning of the game, as there are few places that you won’t be able to go and most areas connect in four directions.
Most stickers have multiple uses, which makes everything you do in the game feel connected, rather than a series of isolated fetch quests. There is also a surprising amount of variety to requests, too: some NPCs will want you to find someone else, others will want you to take them to a particular square on the map, and there are even a couple of minigames for you to take part in, including a rudimentary version of tennis and target practice with a crossbow and arrow – the arrow you’ll need to find first, and you’ll use the crossbow again later in another area to fulfill another request. Several times I thought I was done with a sticker, only to have to go back and fetch it for use in another puzzle, and quite a few of the NPCs wanted me to run more than one errand before they were satisfied. Although dialogue is limited and there isn’t much in the way of personality to the NPCs, I found that it builds a real sense of community when they start to interact with one another through their requests.
To my surprise, A Tiny Sticker Tale anticipated the potential fatigue and frustration certain aspects of its design could have caused in the long run and addressed them very quickly. After playing for about half an hour I found a map which laid out the entire area for me, and let me search for stickers in my collection, showing the exact area that I’d left them in. Later I found a tent with significantly more space inside it, which I could then pick up in Sticker Mode and carry around with me. This made the game much more relaxing to play, without compromising on any of the freedom to explore or the more intuitive puzzle design.
A Tiny Sticker Tale is presented in the same fashion as Ogre Pixel’s previous title, Lonesome Village, with vibrant block colors and bold outlines that are reminiscent of children’s storybooks and cartoons. It’s a simple design that works especially well for it, and makes environmental objects stand out and easy to identify so you know what you can interact with. There are some nice environmental effects between areas as well, thanks to the ability to change the time of day and the weather once you’ve acquired the stickers necessary to do so; there isn’t much of a variation between day and night or sunshine and rain besides from the general ambience of the location, but it’s a nice touch that makes the world feel a little more alive.
The biggest disappointment to be had from A Tiny Sticker Tale is that it’s an extremely short game, even for the asking price. You can easily finish this in a couple of hours, even if you’re aiming to complete the Collection and fulfill every request. Although what is here is highly enjoyable, there isn’t very much here at all, which is worth keeping in mind if you expect to get more than a couple of hours of time from a first playthrough. You can create furniture to customize your tent, so there is some potential for experimentation here, and this would be an excellent game to replay in future, but for a first-time playthrough it unfortunately won’t offer you very much.
The Verdict
Much like my childhood, A Tiny Sticker Tale was over far too quickly, but left me with a warm feeling of contentment that I’ll carry with me when I look back on it. If you’re after a brief and relaxing experience between longer and more demanding titles, this is a title that would be worth looking into.
