And the first completed game of 2024 is… A Tiny Sticker Tale! Which you already knew because that’s the title of this post. Free on Amazon or Epic or something (it’s hard to track these days), A Tiny Sticker Tale was on my Switch eShop wishlist following John Walker’s enthusing on his blog. But since it was free elsewhere, and Steam Deck-able, I moved there instead.

It’s not often I have to rush to complete a game. With this one, I started playing it and my daughter’s ears pricked up and she came over and started to play it vicariously so I had to send her away and tell her to wait her turn while I ran through it as there’s only one save game slot. OK, so it wasn’t exactly a rush, as the game is only a few hours long anyway, but I don’t think I touched on everything.

The ‘hing with A Tiny Sticker Tale is that you pick up items, objects and characters as stickers, put them in your scrapbook, then take them out and use them elsewhere. For example, there’s a river on one of the screens which you can’t cross, but there’s a bridge on another. Unstick the bridge, take it to the river, and plonk it down. Most of the puzzles work in similar ways, a ladder to climb cliffs, or places you have to take the animal characters to.

There’s a fun bit of inventory management (no, really) as you’ve only limited space in your scrapbook and some of the stickers are huge, so you have to move them all around. I realised you can, if you’re careful, make them overhang the pages somewhat, increasing what you can “carry”, but even then, you sometimes have to swap out things. Especially if you’re carrying trees.

None of the puzzles are especially difficult, and I expect some people will find the game excruciatingly twee, but I enjoyed the laid-backness of it, the art style, and the silly characters you meet.

One of the great things about the Steam Deck, especially with Heroic set up so it can seamlessly work with my GOG, Epic and Amazon game libraries, is the huge number of free games I manage to accrue and actually play. Super Adventure Hand was a recent one, free on Amazon Gaming, which I’d stumbled over on the Switch eShop as “eeeer, dunno”. Can’t argue with free though, can you.

And, I’m glad I didn’t pay full whack for it. There’s nothing especially wrong with it, it’s just a bit dull. It starts off with you, as an arm and hand, having the arm severed and kidnapped. You then have some mild platformy and simple puzzley levels to work through in order to get it back.

As a hand, you can grab things like handles and switches, climb up most walls, and “flick” baddies (which are mostly feet, the natural enemy of the hand, apparently). Platforming mostly involved flinging yourself across gaps and grabbing on to the other side, although moving, rotating and intermittently electrified platforms made this a bit harder. Puzzles are often of the “drag boxes to the right places” variety.

There are a few levels which differ from these two staples, such as a couple where you drive a car for some reason, a handful (ha) where you have a skateboard (sadly without any Techdeck fingerboard tricks), and some where you have to rescue mini-hands.

As I said, the game is fine. The wonky physics and sometimes pushing the stick forward flips from “climb up” to “climb down” mid-climb can both be a bit annoying but near instant restarts and mostly generous respawn points mean they’re not really an issue. No, the main issue is that it’s just a bit boring. Ten minutes in and the quirkiness of having Thing to control wears off and you’re left with a pretty generic, and somewhat short and easy, platformer.