'The Tiny Bang Story' is a game I purchased using a discount coupon from crafting badges from cards. I did recall seeing this one around previously, which prompted be to use the coupon to purchase it. It's a hidden-object game with a few different puzzles scattered around the game world.

It's a short little game that took me around 3 hours to complete that matches its $5 USD price. I expect this could of been done faster if I was not playing it while feeling ill and having the day off work, however the game has no time based achievements or penalties and you can take it at your own pace.

On a tiny green planet, a Sports! ball orbits above in the sky. This ball is soon hit by space debris, causing the ball to explode. The explosion shatters reality, scattering jigsaw pieces around the surface of the planet. As the player, you are tasked with navigating five different areas recovering these pieces.

There's no actual plot in this game, but there is a background story to the world building. As you wonder the world you see snippets of a child's rise to fame through aviation, all told through background elements and occasional monitors. There's a few puzzles that link into this as well.

I don't think there's any greater meaning to this for people other than the devs, but I still found it a nice journey.

Each area has its own theme, but the principle of the world remains the same. Find the jigsaw pieces to repair the world and return the light and colour to the planet. Oddly all areas you encounter are already brightly coloured...

While most jigsaw pieces are found right off the main view, to get to some of then you need to solve smaller puzzles. These also involve collecting hidden objects, which usually open a door or vent. Clicking on an item that has a quest for these puzzles will add a notification counter to the right side of the screen. This icon contains the type of object you are looking for, not the specific item itself, unless that item is the final one you need to move to the next area.

While this did mean there is a greater variety of stuff to collect, sometimes the hint is hard to understand what it is you are after. For instance at one point I am to collect bags of luggage for a weight scale to open a boom gate. But I had no idea that the little picture telling me to collect luggage, was a picture of luggage.
I did eventually figure it out by randomly clicking on objects and seeing one float off screen and reduce the notification counter, but this was not immediately obvious.

There's a human characters to find along the way, and they are involved in solving the final puzzle. They don't speak, but will "hmmmm" when you click on them. Clicking on them will produce a thought balloon containing a hint on what you need to do to get the final item from them. Thankfully these become fairly obvious once you unlock all screens within a single area, unlike some of the notifications.

Some of these people do require a few steps to get. And you can find, but not collect, the items they are after before you encounter the person.

The game is pretty simple, and a hint system is available if you want to access it. As you play, mosquitoes will fly around the map. Clicking on one will slowly fill up the hint button in the top right corner. Once unlocked, different mosquito will fly down and slowly circle a collectable object. For the few times I used this, I saw what it was going to circle before it got near it.

Even clicking on the mosquitoes caused my eyes to wonder enough to find hidden pieces a few times too. It's a different way of doing this as it means you do not immediately receive a solution.

And while the game is charming in the art style and music, and moves at the pace of the player, I did have a few bullshit moments with it.

The first is that some hidden objects are almost indistinguishable from the background elements. I know hidden objects are meant to be hidden, but some of these were barely visible when even the hint system was telling me something was there.

I also have concerns about some of the colour matching puzzles, as I know some people that would only solve them through brute-force or assistance.

The second is that two of the puzzles are 'retro arcade games' where you have to move a ship or plane through a path of obstacles. I don't mind these types of games, and certainly played a lot of them in the 1980s, but they are really out of place here. While everything else you can leave and come back seconds/minutes/hours later and see no change, these puzzles require your full attention. They're not hard, they just don't mesh with the rest of the game.

The Tiny Bang Story is a nice hidden-object puzzle game if you're looking for something in the genre. Sadly let down by some pixel hunting and a few other odd choices. While I enjoyed my time playing, it really is one where you'd only get one playthrough.

Game Acquisition: Purchased with coupon
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Thread: 1 - 26 February 2016
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009

OS: Microsoft® Windows® XP SP1 or newer
Processor: 1.5 GHz equivalent or higher processor
Memory: 512 MB
Hard disk space: 180 MB
Video: Standard
DirectX®: DirectX® 9.0c
Sound: Standard