Recently, I seem to be playing and reviewing many more indie games than triple A titles. Perhaps, as I mused in my review of Octodad: Dadliest Catch, it’s the sense of boundless, unbridled imagination that seems to fuel indie games rather than sales figures. Perhaps it points towards a dissatisfaction with many big-budget ‘style over substance’ titles.

I recently played through Stick it to The Man!, another indie gem which I got for free through Sony’s wonderful ‘Playstation Plus’. It’s not about gritty soldiers or grizzled space marines, it’s about a docile man named Ray whose brain is invaded by an alien named ‘Ted’ who bestows him with a giant, spaghetti-like hand that can be used to read minds. Maybe my preference for indie games isn’t such a mystery after all.

Ray is a man who could be charitably described as a loser. He is a professional hard-hat tester, and his job basically involves having weighty objects dropped on him from a great height. His life is bland and uneventful until an alien decides to squat in his brain. He is then chased relentlessly across 10 levels by ‘The Man’, a shadowy misanthrope determined to steal Ray’s powers for himself.

Point and click adventure games have struggled for relevance in today’s world of instant gratification and sophisticated game mechanics. Stick it to The Man! could be indicative of an evolution of the genre. Each level is filled with NPC’s, each unique with their own personality and thoughts which Ray can read with his arm, and most of them have some sort of issue. Each problem can usually be resolved with some sort of ‘sticker’.

For example, early in the game, a man is on the verge of hanging himself because his girlfriend has left him. Upon investigation, it becomes clear she left him for another man because she loves teeth, and her new lover has a lovely set of pearly whites. So, one thing leads to another and Ray has to steal the new lovers teeth by tearing them off (as one would tear off a sticker) and attach the sticker to her old lovers mouth.

The puzzles are very easy to solve, and simply require exploration. Using logic will not get you anywhere. Some characters want something fairly random, like a cup of tea. If you proceed by thinking ‘OK, I’ll look for a kitchen’, you won’t get far. To progress, the player simply has to explore and read the minds of every character he meets and the solutions will reveal themselves. Eventually, tea will pop into somebody’s thoughts and you’ll be able to take it from that

Despite being unchallenging, the puzzles are enjoyable and imaginative. Unfortunately, if feels like the developers didn’t quite believe that people would enjoy the puzzles, so the game is also filled with platforming to keep things varied. Whilst exploring the levels via platforming is fun, as the game progresses, the levels fill with enemies. Unfortunately, this is where the game is at its weakest. It gets incredibly frustrating having to navigate around enemies who are faster than you when your only means of escape is grappling pins to swish around, which can be very imprecise.

Visually, Stick it to The Man! is a constant delight. It’s like a Paper Mario game as directed by Tim Burton. The world is made of cardboard and paper, and Ray can use his gangly arm to whiz around the environments by grappling onto drawing pins. Also, when he dies, rather than switching to a loading screen, Ray is simply re-printed out at the nearest checkpoint.

Stick it to The Man! has its faults, but if there’s one thing that can save a game from its problems, it’s charm, and Stick it to The Man! has bags of it. It has that Double Fine effect where it manages to draw the player in with a moronic but endearing protagonist whilst being consistently funny from start to funny. There was more than one occasion where I laughed out loud, and that made all the frustrating chases worth it.

7/10

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