A fun fact about me is that I recently started collecting stickers. There is something especially fun about how there are so many designs, so many different ways that they can fit together and ways they can be used to tell a story.
Ogre Pixel’s cozy puzzle adventure A Tiny Sticker Tale perfectly captures this feeling. As you navigate the world, the stickers you collect along the way work with the environment around you to enable exploration, unlock secrets, and help you to reconnect Flynn, the donkey with those around him and his past.
After sailing home to Figori Island, Flynn encounters a troublesome raccoon, a pest that was once his father’s own rival, who is going around the island causing chaos. Flynn takes it upon himself to right the wrongs done by the raccoon, who is also able to manipulate the world around him using stickers. Personally, I loved the raccoon character. I thought he was cheeky and fun and gave A Tiny Sticker Tale a sense of flow and purpose that wouldn’t have been quite as effective without him. Plus he is adorable.
The story which runs throughout A Tiny Sticker Tale trickles through as Flynn helps those around him and discovers the island. Sometimes the favors you are asked to complete feel almost random, like catching five fish or helping an old woman see the sunset, but they all help you progress either through giving you useful stickers or, after some particularly big tasks, medallions which are needed to finish the game.
Some stickers can alter the environment around you completely. A sun, for example, will bring about the daytime, a moon brings the night, and a rain cloud brings, you guessed it, rain. There are some places around the island which have indicators that one of these stickers will reveal something, but at other points it is up to you to solve the puzzles involving them. I thought this was a really interesting touch, and made A Tiny Sticker Tale feel a bit more unique knowing how much control stickers really have over the world around you.
There are a few minigames which can be played to unlock collectables, including a slightly frustrating archery minigame which had me coming close to giving up, and tennis with that pesky raccoon I mentioned earlier. They aren’t really necessary to play but they are a bit of light-hearted fun.
There are plenty of collectables to gather as you go through A Tiny Sticker Tale, some of which can be used to uncover mysteries which are hidden around the island. From secret cults to fairies, not everything on the island is as it may seem at first glance, and that made every new discovery feel special. I went into A Tiny Sticker Tale expecting a surface-level puzzle game and was genuinely surprised and pleased at how much there was to uncover in the two-and-a-half hours it took to complete it.
It is not especially challenging to complete the puzzles that come up, particularly if you have already found the sticker that corresponds with the prompt. If you already have a puppy on your sheet then you know exactly how to fulfill the request for a pet, and the same goes for all of the other puzzles. Sometimes NPCs will request to be stuck down somewhere in particular, which will be outlined with a handy dotted line. The best way to go about it, I found, was to pick up anything that looked interesting or unique and try my best to fit it into the book. There is an achievement for picking up every sticker so you may as well do it as you go along.
One of the small joys that came with the gameplay was trying to fit as many stickers onto the rather small sticker sheet as you can. I quickly discovered that you only needed the smallest corner of a sticker to be on the sheet for it to stick, which resulted in huge trees, NPCs and various collected knick-knacks sticking off the sides in rather ridiculous ways. I did discover towards the end of my playthrough that you can actually increase the size of your sticker sheet, though this was unfortunately after I had rearranged all of my possessions to be able to carry around some trees.
At a certain point along the way, Flynn comes across a tent which has been left to him by his father. This can be picked up and carried around, and lets players decorate their own, portable space with furniture and trinkets they have gathered on their adventures. I ended up using the tent as additional storage for things that I didn’t expect I would need again but didn’t want to let go of.
Furniture can be obtained by bringing different trees to the carpenter, who very kindly gives you a bridge early on. There isn’t really a purpose to the furniture other than to gather more stickers and decorate your tent, but it is fun to see what you will get each time. Rather irritatingly, you can’t seem to rotate furniture, meaning chairs all face the same way around a table, for example. It isn’t the most conducive to being able to freely decorate, but in a game about stickers and creativity it is a fun addition nonetheless.
Graphically, A Tiny Sticker Tale is adorable. Each of the characters is unique in their design, the world is beautiful, and the random little stickers are designed so well that I wouldn’t be surprised to see them on a sticker sheet in a craft store. I would definitely buy a sticker pack of the items and NPCs from the game, that’s for sure. Ogre Pixel has done an excellent job of capturing the aesthetic of stickers, particularly when it comes to the white outlines around stickers not placed in the correct spot (which is an aesthetic I love), to the point that it almost feels as though the whole game is a child’s imaginary world that they have created from their own sticker collection.
A Tiny Sticker Tale is quite short, taking about two hours to enjoy the story at a slow pace and an extra half an hour or so to find all of the collectables hidden around the map. Despite the length, it does an excellent job of capturing the feeling of trying to find yourself after losing someone. It is emotional, raw, and beautiful.
A Tiny Sticker Tale is one of the most heart-warming and adorable puzzle games I have played in a long time. Everything from the charming graphics to the focus on joy and helping out those around you works to make a game that is cozy, low-stakes and meaningful all at once.
Megan played A Tiny Sticker Tale on PC with a review code. A Tiny Sticker Tale is also available on Nintendo Switch.
