I have been at the job I am currently at for almost two years and I am ready to leave. This week was a nice line of interviews in an area of work I greatly enjoyed. That said, this week is a smaller puzzle game that was surprisingly good. Follow in your dad’s footsteps this week with A Tiny Sticker Tale.

A Tiny Sticker Tale is a puzzle game from Ogre Pixel. The game was released on October 4th, 2023 for the PC and Nintendo Switch, and retails for $10.

You play as a young donkey who is following their dad’s steps on a journey of discovery. You come from a line of donkeys that have a magical notebook that can take and place stickers from all over this exotic island. It is a heartfelt story that hits a little too close to home at the end and it makes me love it even more. The reason that your father made you come here is important and teaches you an important life lesson while having fun helping people.

You land on the island and are immediately introduced to the main mechanic of the game; the placing of stickers. You can grab almost anything and place it into your notebook for use later. This aligns well with the puzzle aspect of the game because there are objects all over this island that someone will need and you will have to retrieve them and put them into your notebook.

Give the person their thing and they give you a thing to finish another thing. Rinse and repeat.

Many of the puzzles require the player to finish one fetch quest to complete another, but some are genuine brain scratchers. For instance, there comes a point where the player needs to wake an animal up from its nap with music, and my first instinct was to grab something that I saw in a previous area, but I was incredibly wrong. There were multiple steps in concluding the “wake the hippo up” ordeal. There were even parts when I was getting frustrated that I wasn’t getting the “lightbulb moment” quickly like the previous puzzles but I then calmed down and just thought outside the box and it worked like a charm. Most of the puzzle solutions are hinted at by the character that the player is talking to. They will say things like “My entire purpose is to break rocks” or “This is designed specifically to destroy bigger rocks.” A Tiny Sticker Tale is very forward with its puzzle solutions.

The visual presentation of A Tiny Sticker Tale is so cute and colorful. I love it so much. I love it so much even down to how the protagonists kick their little legs when they sit. These little animations make the game so lively and coupled with the visuals make the game filled with charm.

I enjoyed my time with A Tiny Sticker Tale. The puzzles are not as difficult as I made them out to be. As long as you pay attention to the characters as they talk and the surrounding items in the area, then it’ll be a breeze. The ending was not something that I saw coming and it was even more heartwarming all the same.

If you have $10 lying around and want a fun game to play with someone who really does not play video games much then A Tiny Sticker Tale is a game for you. A heartwarming story with simple mechanics and rewarding puzzles makes for a good video game.