A Tiny Sticker Tale review

• Reviews by Beau
• Published:

It's easy to grow attached to this slight but charming casual puzzler for a few hours of diverting animal fun

A Tiny Sticker Tale from Ogre Pixel is a colorfully child-friendly fable about Flynn the donkey, whose father has left him with words of wisdom and a world to explore with help from a magical sticker album. While a very short and a very relaxed experience, the intuitive gameplay and clever puzzles elevate it above your standard casual game. And besides, you get to play with stickers! Which was a decent lure for me but a major draw for my six-year-old daughter, who has gleefully played this game to completion five times in the past month.  

The tale begins as Flynn arrives by himself by boat on a faraway island with the sticker book. A letter from his father simply encourages him to keep collecting stickers, though the reason for this parental guidance is intermittently revealed as you progress. One of Flynn’s bird friends gives him a brief tutorial on how to advance past the first couple areas of Figori Island. Gameplay is simple: on every screen there are objects—perhaps a palm tree, a crab, or even the sun and moon—that you can pick up and add to your sticker book. You can then place them anywhere you fancy—on that screen or any other—to either solve puzzles or simply decorate the island. For example, the crab can be used to cut down a bush blocking your path. Or you might use a rain cloud to bring much needed water to a desert area. 

While playing on the PC is simple enough with the mouse to use stickers and the keyboard to move around and access menus, I played on the Steam Deck, which allows for full directional movement with the joystick. You can also use a gamepad with your computer for a similar experience. However you play, there will be a button to toggle between sticker mode (where you pick up and place stickers) and regular mode where you can walk around and talk to others. Items or characters that can be picked up will highlight when you hover over them.

The story advances by helping out Flynn’s various animal friends on the island, including the pesky raccoon that is trying to sabotage your plans. They’re all cutely drawn and charming in their own way. Malon the boar needs trees in order to build furniture. Jasper the bunny requires an arrow so folks can play his archery game. And the island’s angry bird of prey must get its egg back in the nest. In some cases you will be given a sticker you can use elsewhere as a reward for your assistance. In others you will receive a scroll from another animal, one of five letters from your father expressing appreciation for your generosity towards your animal friends while imparting life lessons. Brief cutscenes accompany each scroll that show important moments between Flynn and his father. Finding all the scrolls finishes the game.

A Tiny Sticker Tale

Genre:	Fantasy
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Magical
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Stylized
Gameplay:	Environmental puzzler, Puzzle, Quest
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Low

This main story, consisting primarily of fetch quests, is quite simple and easily accessible to children. Yet there are many optional puzzles requiring deductive reasoning that help you further explore the island and learn more of its secrets. I even looked up a hint for a puzzle that admittedly wasn’t entirely intuitive. I can’t say that completing any of the puzzles was a source of pride, but many were still fun to solve. Lots of stickers can and need to be used in multiple locations. While that rain cloud mentioned earlier is useful for bringing water to the desert, it’s also needed elsewhere. A fishing rod is required to catch five separate fish around the island, and you’ll need to keep bringing the fishing rod sticker with you everywhere you go. My favorite sticker in the game is a stuffed Flynn doll that can be placed anywhere on the map, causing the real Flynn to instantly switch places with it. 

About halfway through A Tiny Sticker Tale, Flynn acquires a tent that he can enter with three rather large empty rooms. The game encourages you to decorate your tent however you like, whether it's with furniture built by Malon, or Christmas and Halloween decorations you can get from your friend Nio in exchange for other stickers. There’s no puzzle involved and no achievements available for adorning your tent, so the exercise is simply a way to play with your stickers as if you had a real book in front of you. And don’t worry; you can never permanently lose a sticker you need later. 

The screen itself is made to look like a sticker book, with a large patterned border leaving only half the screen in the middle for the squarish playing area. The world also looks like a sticker book, with hard lines, vivid cartoony colors and simple shapes, and minimal use of shadowing and perspective. Yet it’s not all still life. By the ocean there’s an animation of waves crashing on the shore. Fish move around in the pond. And lights will sometimes blink on and off. The stickers themselves look like stickers when you’re hovering them over the scene, but then neatly integrate when you place them. Two additional menu screens are available as well. There is a bird’s-eye map you can access in case you get lost (though there is no quick travel option), and a separate book (a bit like an RPG’s bestiary) that shows all the stickers you’ve collected in addition to outlines of the one you haven’t. 

The music and sounds (which can be separately toggled on and off) are a mixed bag. Each screen has a light synthesized jingle that changes a bit in tone depending on whether you’re in the mountains, the graveyard, in a cave, or on the beach. While an impressive array of instrument sounds is used, it becomes quite repetitive and I mostly played with the music off or on low volume. The act of moving stickers employs a sound akin to drips splashing into water, which is not unpleasant but decidedly unlike any sound I’ve ever heard a sticker make. Flynn’s footsteps are similar, presumably because he’s lifting himself off the page with each step. The constant noise is a bit distracting, and the other sound effects (such as the bird cawing or arrows whipping through the air) are not necessarily impressive enough to keep the volume high, especially since there is no voice acting. 

The average adult player should finish in about two to three hours, with another hour tacked on if you want to nab all the achievements for finding island secrets or simply discovering every sticker. This is the perfect length given the game’s limited scope. There is little in the way of replay value (unless you’re six), as no puzzles have multiple solutions and the story is not very deep. While many would describe the tale as charming (and I wouldn’t disagree), it’s not particularly moving. But I rather enjoyed this unique experience as a one-off on a lazy afternoon. My daughter, obviously, was enthralled enough to revisit it multiple times, even knowing exactly what to expect, sharing her own likes and dislikes as follows: 

A Child’s Pros

• I liked moving things around
• I love talking to the characters and seeing what they say
• It’s a pretty fun game

A Child’s Cons

• It was pretty hard getting around to places
• I hated the raccoon and all his mischievous things 

Final Verdict

A Tiny Sticker Tale is a short adventure that quite adeptly explores its premise of using and reusing stickers to solve puzzles. While the story is sentimental, it's fairly shallow, leaving the enjoyment of the game reliant on its leisurely sticker mechanic and light-hearted mood. In that respect the game is a success. It’s simple enough for young children to enjoy, while clever enough for adults to play by themselves as well, so with the right expectations going in, you will find an entertaining little diversion that scratches the itch for a little casual adventuring that’s fun for the whole family. 

Beau played A Tiny Sticker Tale on Steam Deck using a review code provided by the game's publisher. Beau's daughter played it on PC. Many times. Beau would like his PC back.

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