Stick It to The Man!

Have you noticed this new trend?

Every other game at the moment seems to be made of paper. Media Molecule's origami epic Tearaway landed on Vita only a week or so ago, and the pop-up-book handsomeness of Tengami is just over the horizon.

However, there's one title made from chopped up bits of dead trees that may have gone under your radar, and that's comedy platformer Stick It to The Man!

Mind meddling

In this one you play as Ray, a hard-hat tester who falls into a coma only to wake up with the realization that he's got a 16-foot pink arm protruding from his cranium.

He's the only one who can see this spaghetti-limbed extremity, of course. And it gives him the power to read other people's minds, of course.

Thing is, it's not that simple for Ray. After waking up, a shadowy government agent known only as The Man is hellbent on chasing him down, to attain the strange power Ray has now acquired.

The game is completely absurd in tone, which is to be expected when the man responsible for Dinosaur Comics and the Adventure Time comics - Ryan North - has penned the dialogue.

Stick It to The Man! brings in some innovative fun to the standard platformer template, too.

Imagine it as a meeting of minds between the genius of Tim Schafer's crazy point-and-click adventures, the cardboard delight of LittleBigPlanet's 2.5D levels, and Paper Mario: Sticker Star's clever use of special stickers.

It doesn't quite reach the lofty heights of those games, but it's a lot of fun nonetheless.

Every level is completely open for exploration, so that you can backtrack to read the minds of other characters you come across and then solve their needs through some clever puzzle solving.

It's here that the point-and-click elements of play emerge as you discover each colourful character's plight and solve it by slapping a relevant sticker their way.

You might help one man decide to not kill himself by helping him attain super-shiny teeth with which to woo his former lover. Or you could help a sailor who just wanted to catch a huge whale once more, requiring you to find a mental taxidermist for the purpose.

Things are made all the more enjoyable thanks to the world's papery aesthetic. Slapping stickers down feels far more enjoyable than you'd have thought - especially as it works both with touch and traditional controls - and peeling back hidden areas by tugging at the curled corner of a piece of paper is a tiny touch of genius.

It also helps that everything has that janky, lopsided, drawn-on-with-crayon look to it too.

While it's relatively short in length, and doesn't have a whole host of reasons for you to dive back in upon completion, the storyline, world and characters make Stick It to The Man! more than worth the money.