While exploring, you talk to all sorts of bizarre characters (and eavesdrop on their thoughts), ranging from asylum inmates and a man trying to coax his pet alligator out of the sewers to a seagull and a taxidermist looking for a new challenge. This sounds simple, but it can sometimes be hard to locate the cursor amid the colourful backgrounds.Ĭharacter concept art: 'The Man', Ron the cop, and Ray's girlfriend Arlene This works fine (although the keyboard controls are clunkier for maneuvering than using a gamepad), but there is a visible cursor in this version that you need to manually line up with highlighted hotspots.
#TINY THIEF PUZZLE PIRATE PC#
The PC controls use the WASD keys to move, space to jump, the mouse wheel to scroll inventory (when carrying more than one item at a time) and the left and right mouse buttons to perform actions and read minds.
This takes some getting used to and isn't very precise even after you do. Pressing a button then snaps the hand to the hotspot and the appropriate action is taken automatically. When you move the hidden cursor around, though, interactive hotspots (such as somebody's brain, a push-pin or sticker's edge) will reveal themselves by changing colour or forming a ring around them. The first few minutes, I suspected my controller was broken because I couldn't get the hand to point to something I wanted to investigate.
Instead, you control an invisible cursor and the hand follows it at a distance. In Stick It to the Man, you might expect to be controlling the hand at the end of the spaghetti arm. Adventure gamers are used to having direct control over the cursor. The interface is a bit confusing at first. (The main menu lists how many minds you've read and how many were available to you so you might want to go back to see what you've missed). You cannot manually save, but you can replay any of the ten chapters as many times as you want after you've finished them. Throughout each level you'll find printers that double as checkpoints, named Mr. About half the chapters are dreams and nightmares inside Ray's mind and memories, while others take place in different sections of the city, inside an insane asylum, and even on a space ship.Įach chapter is essentially one huge location spanning multiple screens, and you move around by walking between platforms, which you can jump to or swing to using your new “arm” (making use of handily placed push-pins). This involves exploring the whole area and collecting all available objects, even if you might not initially know what you'll need them for. While it's often obvious what the actual goal of the stage is, the steps you'll need to follow to get it done are obscure (in a fun way). In each level, you'll engage in several quests that include a long chain of find-and-combine item puzzles. This is all complemented by a jazzy, noir musical score and wacky, over-the-top voice acting that really brings the silly characters to life.
Stick It to the Man consists of ten chapters at the beginning and end of each, and after solving certain puzzles, animated cutscenes are shown in the same style, integrated smoothly and seamlessly. Characters’ heads bob comically up and down at the mouth while speaking, completely disconnecting the two halves. The whole side-scrolling world, including all of its characters, is made to look as if it were cut out of paper and stickers, and the surreal hand-drawn art style is very effective in sketching the twisted, crazy world Ray lives in. Ray quickly discovers that he can use his new appendage to listen to other people's thoughts and peel off stickers from their thought bubbles and the environment, which comes in handy for learning the cabbie’s hidden secret that will (literally) set the wheels in motion.
#TINY THIEF PUZZLE PIRATE DRIVER#
Eager to show it to his girlfriend, he needs to get a taxi to take him home, but the cab driver is suicidal for private reasons of his own, so he doesn't want to drive anyone anywhere. When Ray wakes up, he has a pink spaghetti arm growing out of his head. Ray is a hard hat tester, and when he leaves for home one fateful day, ironically a plane overhead drops a mysterious canister right on him. What would you do if you suddenly acquired the power to read people's minds? This very phenomenon happens to Ray, the protagonist in Zoink Games' Stick It to the Man. Our latest excursion resulted in two whimsically charming side-scrolling games, Stick It to the Man and Tiny Thief. As more and more adventures move away from puzzle-heavy experiences, we once again venture outside traditional genre boundaries looking for new and interesting puzzling experiences.
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