About.com Rating

Pros: Fun stealth/chase sequences, cool looking, funny, engaging story, has a Psychonauts quality.
Cons: Short, overly simple puzzles, poorly implemented gamepad use.

Would you like to play a game where you’re psychic, everything’s made of paper, and you’ll get to talk to Santa, Elvis, some zombies, and an insane taxidermist? Because I’ve just played a game like that - Stick It to the Man - and it made me very, very happy.

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Developed by: Ripstone
Published by: Zoink!
Genre: Action-Adventure
For ages: 13 and up
Platform: Wii U
Release Date: May 1, 2014
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The Story: Tear Down Those Walls Mr. Hand

In SITTM, you play a meek hardhat tester named Ray who spends his days being rained down upon by hammers. All this experience in getting hit on the head fails to help when a package falls out of a plane and knocks him unconscious. He dreams there’s a pink hand growing out of his head, and wakes up to find, yes, there is. This hand can tear the thoughts out of other people’s minds, and mysterious men are chasing him, trying to get that hand for themselves, leading Ray to mysterious places and into his own mind for a solution.

The game’s visual design is wondrous, with Ray a paper cutout living in a paper world. At times this world peels and Ray can use his mysterious hand to pull that peeling paper away and reveal what’s underneath, or to grab push-pins placed here and there to make high jumps or travel through walls.

He can also use that hand to massage the brains of people he meets and listen to their thoughts. If they think hard enough, he can pull objects from their thought balloons and use them in the real world or to change the minds of others.

The Gameplay: A Little Puzzling, a Little Running, a Little Mindreading

Beneath its whacky exterior, SITTM is a 2D sidescrolling adventure/platformer that mixes exploration with simple puzzle solving and engaging stealth.

The game has much in common with adventure games. Much of the time you simply need to find the right object and use it in the right place. Puzzles are sometimes amusing, but more brainpower is used in remembering where interactive areas of the game are than in working out what to do once you reach them.

The game’s stealth sequences are more interesting. In these, you need to maneuver through a series of platforms while avoiding roving bad guys. If one is sleepy, you can grab “Zs” from his brain that work as a knockout drug, and if one is thinking of your face, you can grab your own image and place it on a guard who will then be chased by the rest. I often needed multiple tries to bypass a guarded area, but the game is generous with checkpoints so things move quickly.

The Gamepad: Swing and a Miss

The game does something very interesting with the Wii U’s gamepad. Lift up the controller and you go into mind-reading mode, where you can move the controller around to find and zoom in on people near you and read their thoughts. It’s a great idea that fails in execution. First off, it means you have to keep the gamepad almost flat when you’re doing anything but reading minds, and it’s very easy to accidentally bring things to a halt by tilting the controller a little. Second, the thoughts are only heard through the gamepad, and I could barely hear those thoughts unless I plugged in headphones (the developer should really patch in a gamepad volume slider). I soon turned off gamepad mode, but if it had been done a little better I would have been quite impressed.

The Verdict: Terrifically Entertaining

Stick it to the Man is more than the sum of its parts. Those parts, - overly simple puzzles, great voice acting, amusing but rarely laugh-out-loud dialogue, a sprightly score, striking cartoon visuals, short length (around 5 hours), an engaging story, and a general nuttiness, somehow combine into one of the most delightful games I’ve played this year. As in the old song, this game is little more than a paper moon sailing over a cardboard sky, but that’s not so bad when you can reach up and grab that moon with the skinny pink hand growing out of your head.