And the first completed game of 2024 is… A Tiny Sticker Tale! Which you already knew because that’s the title of this post. Free on Amazon or Epic or something (it’s hard to track these days), A Tiny Sticker Tale was on my Switch eShop wishlist following John Walker’s enthusing on his blog. But since it was free elsewhere, and Steam Deck-able, I moved there instead.
It’s not often I have to rush to complete a game. With this one, I started playing it and my daughter’s ears pricked up and she came over and started to play it vicariously so I had to send her away and tell her to wait her turn while I ran through it as there’s only one save game slot. OK, so it wasn’t exactly a rush, as the game is only a few hours long anyway, but I don’t think I touched on everything.
The ‘hing with A Tiny Sticker Tale is that you pick up items, objects and characters as stickers, put them in your scrapbook, then take them out and use them elsewhere. For example, there’s a river on one of the screens which you can’t cross, but there’s a bridge on another. Unstick the bridge, take it to the river, and plonk it down. Most of the puzzles work in similar ways, a ladder to climb cliffs, or places you have to take the animal characters to.
There’s a fun bit of inventory management (no, really) as you’ve only limited space in your scrapbook and some of the stickers are huge, so you have to move them all around. I realised you can, if you’re careful, make them overhang the pages somewhat, increasing what you can “carry”, but even then, you sometimes have to swap out things. Especially if you’re carrying trees.
None of the puzzles are especially difficult, and I expect some people will find the game excruciatingly twee, but I enjoyed the laid-backness of it, the art style, and the silly characters you meet.
