I played A Tiny Sticker Tale with my 5-year-old daughter for a laugh, but was nearly brought to tears by its poignant themes of fatherhood

"Booooooo," my daughter and I scream in unison whenever that sneaky, troublemaking raccoon pops up on my Switch screen. Later, we'll learn a valuable lesson about how Rocky the raccoon is actually a nice bloke who's simply misunderstood, trying to find his way in the world and make sense of it all. But in the here and now he's spoiling our fun by being a mischievous wee sod, moving key items out of reach and pulling up bridges to block our path.

My daughter and I are playing A Tiny Sticker Tale, a lighthearted endeavor that indie developer Ogre Pixel bills as a "cozy adventure about changing the world, using the power of stickers!" In practice, this sees you filling the teeny tiny boots of Flynn the donkey, exploring a tile-based map chock-full of friendly anthropomorphic townsfolk, and carrying out a steady string of fetch quests and favors, completing puzzles and meeting specific criteria to progress its light-touch narrative. 

I admittedly don't play loads of games of this nature, but there's flavors of Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Zelda: Link's Awakening (minus the combat) in there, with a healthy dose of mix-and-match adventure game mechanics; framed here by Flynn's uncanny ability to turn surrounding inanimate objects into stickers that can be transferred between his sticker book and the real world. 

It looks lovely, it's easy to understand, and it's full of choices and basic puzzles that occasionally leave you scratching your head but never for too long. But more than any of this, above all else and most importantly for me, A Tiny Sticker Tale makes my daughter laugh.

Stick 'em up

That's one of the main reasons I wanted to play A Tiny Sticker Tale in the first place. I cut my teeth on the Atari ST in the early '90s, and credit DMA Design's Lemmings as the first video game I ever played, sat alongside my dad while excitedly shouting at our rear-projection monitor as we haphazardly saved the lives of the titular blue-robed, green-haired sprites on-screen. My daughter is now at an age where she's showing an interest in games – we got the Platinum Trophy in My Little Pony: Adventures in Maritime Bay earlier this year, I'll have you know – and I'm keen to encourage her early steps into the hobby. She loves stickers in real life, and so watching me play A Tiny Sticker Tale over my shoulder, and then taking on some of its less complicated set-pieces, has been great fun. 

Early doors in the game's story, for example, one friendly critter is too hot under the summer sun. They'll give you a key item for a different villager if you help them out, and so you're required to backtrack to a different map screen, uproot a few shady trees, pop them into your sticker book, and then replant them around the chap who's baking in the heat. They offer thanks, hand over the key item, and then you're on your way to the next conundrum.

From there, A Tiny Sticker Tale follows that prescribed formula pretty rigorously as you uncover narrative vignettes, learning more about the wider world and the idiosyncrasies of the folk who call it home as you go. I won't spoil the specifics, but part of Flynn's tale relates to his relationship with his father – and while the importance of family and friendships is a constant theme throughout A Tiny Sticker Tale, this particular story thread caught me off-guard. It's heartfelt, poignant, and genuinely moving, almost at odds with the rest of the game's whimsical framing and yet so perfectly fitting at the same time. It's an emotionally-charged string of conversations that are so unexpectedly powerful that I was almost brought to tears.

Last year was so dominated by sprawling, blockbuster, time-stealing games – The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur's Gate 3, Starfield, and Marvel's Spider-Man 2 to name but a few – and so A Tiny Sticker Tale stands out for me as a short but amazing experience that's now as important in my own end-of-year reflections as any of 2023's biggest hitters. My daughter and I spent the entirety of the game's three or so-hour runtime booing at Rocky the raccoon, giggling at the silly combinations of stickers we'd deliberately get wrong when solving puzzles, and cooing at the sheer cuteness of Flynn the donkey. I'd pretend I wasn't getting emotional at every turn, and my daughter, bless her, spent much of our time together asking if I was okay. 

I was okay, and all the better for playing A Tiny Sticker Tale – an inadvertent pantomime, a bonding experience, an emotional rollercoaster, a bloody good cozy adventure game and an unexpected late entry into my personal Game of the Year list for last year.  

For more exciting indie releases check out our roundup of upcoming indie games, or see what else we've been enjoying with our Indie Spotlight series.