Stick it to the Man – Switch Review

Zoink Games have built themselves a reputation of the last few years of creating quality games, but with a quirky art style, the one that really cemented that was Stick it to the Man and now the games has come to Nintendo Switch.

The game tells the story of Ray, he is an average guy who has an average job and lives in a pretty average town, but on the way home one day, he is smacked in the head by a secret canister that fell from an overhead plane. When he wakes up, he comes to find he has a glowing purple hand coming out of his head, that only he can see and then the adventure really begins. As you move around town, Ray can use his newest appendage to read the minds of people he comes across, as well as interacting with the games world, moving items and collecting them as well. The premise is quite simple, and it feels like classic adventure games, akin to Monkey Island or Indiana Jones, so fans of that genre are going to feel at home here.

The bulk of the gameplay comes from you reading the minds of people, then working out how best to resolve the situation that they are in, sometimes its as simple as giving them an item, other times it is only part of a much larger process. Thankfully moving around the world and controlling your purple hand are easy enough to do, there are times though, if there are a lot of interactive items or people in a single spot where the hand controls can be a little tricky to handle, but those are rare. Each stage that you get to explore has enough fun things to see, at least at first, that you won’t get bored visiting similar locations, something other games in the genre tend to do a lot, but the game does not allow for any real replay, once you complete it, going back is not required.

The Switch version is a great release, it contains the same controls and gameplay offered by the other versions and even better it keeps the wonderful visuals intact as well. When you look at the game, the visuals are perhaps the thing you will notice the most and take away the most, the look is like nothing else out there. The cardboard aesthetic is done quite well and while it does not match the likes of Paper Mario or Tearaway, it still looks great, swapping between levels, like from the foreground to the background has a nice little visual touch that does work and thankfully is never forced upon you to much to feel overused. The sound design also benefits from the less is more camp and while the voice acting can feel campy at times, the score keeps it all from becoming a jumbled mess.

If you have a Switch and you have not yet played Stick it to the Man, you are depriving yourself of a great gaming experience. While the game still falls to the short side and does not offer any real sense of replayability, outside you want to play it again, it is still a great game and worthy of your attention.

Review copy provided by Zoink Games