Cute, breezy and wholesome. A Tiny Sticker Tale is a fun few hours of play with kids; but it doesn’t really satisfy a more experienced gamer.
You are an adorable donkey, looking for your father on a puzzlesome island. You’ll need to help out the island’s inhabitants in order to progress through the little bit of story on offer.
The art style is great; simplistic, whimsical and cartoony. The thick white outline that appears around an object when you grab it really sells the idea that it has become a sticker. Character designs are fun and lovable, my daughter wanted to collect them all in real life!
In contrast to their visual design, NPC writing is quite bland; lacking character or any sort of quirkiness you’d expect from an island full of humanoid animals. Without voice acting, the game is reliant on its writing to express personality, and it just isn’t there unfortunately.
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The puzzles themselves are pretty straightforward; find the right sticker for the right job. This might be a fetch quest for an NPC, moving the NPC themselves or using a sticker to interact with the environment.
There are some cool sticker effects such as changing the weather or the time of day, but they were ultimately underused, and the changes they brought to the game were mostly surface level.
Marketing for the game promised the ability to pick up anything in the world and move it around as a sticker; in reality, only certain objects can be moved around, often having to be placed in a specific location. So rather than using your imagination and creativity to solve a task, you’re really just looking for the missing puzzle piece.
Not having touch screen controls for the Switch version is such a big miss. The main gameplay mechanic is moving things in and out of your pack, and around the screen; touch screen controls should be a no-brainer. Even my four-year-old was running her fingers across the screen, intuitively trying to drag and drop stickers. With a mouse, it probably isn’t an issue, but with an analogue stick it’s just more awkward than it needs to be.
For a game where you’re CONSTANTLY popping in and out of your inventory, there’s no button to open and close it directly. You need to change into sticker mode and then move your cursor to the bottom of the screen and click a tab. It sounds trivial, but for a game that requires you to go into your inventory hundreds of times, it really gets annoying.
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With an almost non-existent story, bland characters, and an uninspired puzzle system; I wasn’t very impressed with A Tiny Sticker Tale… However, my daughter was. For all my issues with the game, it didn’t stop her wanting to play it non-stop and collect every last sticker! It’s a safe and wholesome game that isn’t too hard for younger gamers to understand; something I’m always appreciative of.
Quest Daily scores A Tiny Sticker Tale:
7/10
