

Tiny Thief replaces them with environmental logic puzzles that focus on exploring the wonderful scenes that the developer has created and figuring out how each one works. A big part of why Tiny Thief is less frustrating than the average point-and-click is because it intelligently simplifies certain genre idioms such as item collection (and God forbid “combining” items). While something can be said about a point-and-click that can really get the gears turning, Tiny Thief seems perfectly content in delighting kids and adults alike. You have to get quite a ways through Tiny Thief before the puzzles start getting challenging. The logic behind the puzzles is as zany and fun as the art style, so expect to be surprised, entertained and humored by how they play out. While most good point-and-click adventure games depend on deep story and rich characters, Tiny Thief is all about the magic of pushing the big red button and seeing what happens. Everything else is as easy as tapping on objects or characters to interact with them. You can move around freely in the stages just by tapping where you want to move-but being seen by hostile characters will force you to restart from a safe location. Despite the game being broken up into individual stages, the game is also broken up into chapters so that you are often working toward a single goal or following a small storyline (or a bigger one, towards the end of the game). It’s all done in gloriously smooth animation and beautiful hand-crafted art.


In another you’ll be helping the villagers overthrow the bullying town sheriff. In one stage you’ll be setting free an oppressed little piggy. You play as a kid thief who-along with his pet ferret-make it through each stage by sneaking past guards and snatching things along the way. Tiny Thief doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but when your game has the charm and personality of a Pixar film, it hardly matters. But you really shouldn’t-you’d be passing up not only one of the cutest iOS games of the year, but also a thoroughly entertaining point-and-click adventure game. Add in the fact that every other game in the App Store today uses Rovio’s tired three-star stage completion format and you might pass over Tiny Thief without blinking an eye. Playing as a thief isn’t exactly a novel concept-especially when you look at the amount of games that involve sneaking around that have come out in just the past year or two.
