There was a time when stickers were currency. On the playground, a ‘scratch and sniff’ trade could buy you a snack, or a dollar, or even a future favour. Puffy stickers were equally worthy – and if you had the ones with little beads inside, you were basically a millionaire. For an entire generation of children, stickers were coveted possessions. Whether they were rewards for good work in the classroom, or purchased in bulk from the dollar store, they all had value. Upcoming adventure game A Tiny Sticker Tale brought back those fond memories of childhood sticker-collecting joy.
In A Tiny Sticker Tale, you play as Flynn, an adorable donkey living in a sticker-filled world. With a magical sticker book by his side, he can transform his home world, picking up items like bridges, rocks, trees, and citizens, and taking them along his journey.
While aesthetically, the game resembles the Paper Mario franchise, most notably its
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In the game’s freely-available demo, you can see some of these brilliant mini-puzzles on display. In one environment, you’ll find a woodworker in need of tools. In another, a character with an axe – but to get the axe to the woodworker, the current owner needs help with their own trouble.
It’s a multi-faceted fetch quest you’ll be sent on, with interlocking parts to be found in each biome. One item will get you another, and that item will help unlock a third. Eventually, the woodworker will create a bridge, and that bridge can be used to cross a stream, to find a miner – and so on.
The demo for the game had a handful of head-scratchers too, with a layer of thought needed to solve particularly clever conundrums – like how to conjure the sun, so the miner has enough light to crack rocks blocking a cave, or how to get an elderly sheep to his favourite ocean shore.
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With each sticker in its rightful place, the world of A Tiny Sticker Tale comes to life in shades of green, blue, and yellow. Figori Island is a picturesque setting, with each of its mini-biomes hiding a satisfying array of secrets, and all are easily transformed by Flynn’s magic sticker book.
There’s such a pure sense of whimsy in the adventure that it’s easy to be caught up in this strange world, where even sentient animals can be turned into stickers to be deployed at your convenience. And with its approach to free-form stickering, you can also lazily spend your time decorating tiny islands with cute animals, plants, and other items, using your powers to bring Figori to life.
In the same way a blank page of a sticker book is a canvas to be decorated with all the scratch n’ sniff and puffy stickers you can wrangle, the world of Figori is your oyster. You can place a crab on the beach, put palms along the sand, take the sun out of the sky. On placement, each sticker finds a home and immediately leaps to life – trees swaying in the breeze, light emanating from the sun, crabs skittering in the surf.
It conjures wonderful, nostalgic feelings, of a time when sticker trades were more important than various housing crises, job stability, and global conflict. It’s warm, lovely, and pure. With A Tiny Sticker Tale, it certainly feels like Ogre Pixel has something genuine and special in the works.
While the demo for the game launched as part of the Steam Next Fest celebrations, it remains live as of writing, so you can still check out the game for yourself. For now, A Tiny Sticker Tale does not have a firm release date, but Ogre Pixel is providing frequent updates and news on its Kickstarter page.
