[Review] Stick it to the Man

Developed By : Zoink Games Published By : Zoink Games

Release Date : Nov 23, 2017

What would you do if one day, you had a gigantic pink spaghetti-arm sticking out of your head? What if this arm was only visible to you and nobody else, and it granted you the power to read other people’s minds and change the world around you with stickers? Well, that’s what happened to Ray.

After finishing a shift as a hard-hat tester, Ray is walking home from work when an object plummets from the sky and conks him on the head (maybe if he had brought his work home with him…). He falls into a coma-like state where, in this dreamworld, there is a pink arm sticking out of his head. This arm grants him the few powers mentioned above, as well as the ability to grab onto red pushpins in the world and swing to higher and hard-to-reach places.

When he wakes up, he’s being thrown out of a hospital because his insurance doesn’t cover head injuries (go figure). On his walk home from the hospital he learns two things. The spaghetti-arm is real, and a bunch of nasty guys in suits are chasing after him for a crime he’s unaware of committing. After he returns home, his girlfriend reveals that she can’t see the supposed arm sticking out of his head, and tells him to seek psychiatric help for sounding crazy.

Stick it to the Man is a puzzle and platforming game, and it’s presented as a 2D paper themed world that is equal parts wacky and beautiful. Certain points the levels will be “loose”, able to be torn away with “the hand” to reveal things that will help you progress.

Your main way of progressing is by completing puzzles that require you to read people’s minds to discover what they need, and then find the respective sticker to help them. Most levels will have a sort of domino feature, where you will only find one or two stickers freely in the level, and the rest will be rewards from solving those puzzles and bringing the new stickers where they need to be.

Combat is virtually non-existant in Stick it to the Man. A few levels in, after you’re introduced to the goons chasing you down, you learn a mechanic where you can sneak up on these guys and read their thoughts, typically about eating a lot of food recently and being extremely tired. This will produce a sleepy sticker which you can then slap on one of the goons and put him to sleep allowing you to sneak by unharmed. Otherwise, if Ray takes a single hit he’s done for and sent back to the most recent printer you walked past.

Speaking of which, the respawns are one of my favorite features of this game. It’s a quirky way of sticking to the paper-world theme and honestly, after I saw it the first time, I might have intentionally walked off the level a couple of extra times just to see it again.

Everything about this game is equal parts wacky and beautiful. The humor is on point, even a little dark at times, but when you factor in that Ryan North from Adventure Time wrote the story, it just fits. The platforming might be on the simpler side, but puzzles are easily the high point of this game in my opinion, and are a ton of fun. Stick it to the Man will be a great addition to your Switch library, so don’t hesitate to snag this one from the eShop.