There is a wide breadth of games out there for kids, with most of them being cheap tablet games that require you to subscribe to a monthly subscription or low-quality franchise games designed to hook uneducated parents for $60. Fortunately for parents out there, Ogre Pixel developed the adorable and kid-friendly game called A Tiny Sticker Tale, which is perfect for children and adults.
A Tiny Sticker Tale gives you about a two to four hour experience where you will meander around an island meeting cute little animals and solving various puzzles using stickers. It seems pretty simple, and you would think that for a kids’ game it would be relatively easy or uninteresting. Rest assured, I think I was more interested in solving some of these puzzles than my own child was. While her 20-minute run was met with, “I wanna do something else,” my heart was still adamant on trying to find a dog for the old man on a mountain.
A Tiny Sticker Tale is all about simplicity within concept and execution. You use your mouse to pick up various environmental elements and place them within your magical sticker book so you can apply said stickers anywhere else in this world. Trees, buckets, crabs, and even characters can be picked up and placed neatly in your book. As you collect a mass of stickers, you’ll begin to discover which combination of environment and sticker creates the desired result. Characters will always give you clues that are simple enough to understand, and adding this visual element makes it easy for children to draw lines of “I want a pet” to the puppy or kitten they find.
Gameplay wise, it is easy to pick up and use right away. Standard movement keys and A, D, W, S are used to navigate the world, and left and right clicks open your sticker book and place stickers around each area. There are no other elements to it, which is absolutely fine because the controls play to themselves quite well. I can’t really ask for more depth here because everything compliments each other very well.
With stickers as your main resource to solve puzzles, placing them in your book is another puzzle in itself. Some items are used for only one situation while others may be used to solve 2 or even 3 puzzles. Keeping all stickers on your page is impossible, so you have to think about what you want to use. Luckily, there is one neat little loophole: the tent.
When you stumble upon this tent, you can pick it up and place it in your book. It does take up a significant amount of room, but you can go into the tent and store some items there or use it for the fun reason and decorate it with all the neat little things you find. You can also bring trees to a special character who will make items for you at random.
As for the style, it is really nice and calming. Characters, artwork, and even the music are all aesthetically pleasing. Characters have this cute cartoon style that properly sets the tone while the warm soundtrack and effects play to the theme of the game. It is a welcoming experience that brings kids into this neat little world and can easily bring a family together. Plus, it’s way better than using a scraper to carefully remove a precious unicorn sticker from a mirror or newly painted wall.
Because of the scope of the game, I can’t say that there are many issues or qualms. The only problem arises when you get too close to an NPC and you accidentally get stuck in a conversation a couple of times over, giving me Ocarina of Time PTSD. Aside from that and a few spelling mistakes, which I can dismiss since Ogre Pixel is a very small indie team from Aguascalientes, Mexico, and they might not be fluent in English, I can say there are no real problems with the game.
A Tiny Sticker Tale is available on the Nintendo Switch, Steam, is Steam Deck verified, and releases October 4th.
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