May 2019 will continue to be full of gigantic CRPGs, so I peppered the Indie Game of the Week schedule with games like The Tiny Bang Story: very chill, very short, very not at all violent and bloody. Sometimes Indie games work best because they're capable of taking risks and focusing on aspects like narration and atypical-to-AAA aesthetics (mostly pixels, granted, but also other distinctive artstyles like Cuphead and Journey) that separate them from whatever pay-to-win shooter or open-world game the big publishers just spat out this month, but I often find they work best when they're little palate cleansers between larger games: not always as casual as The Tiny Bang Story, but often something that only politely demands a few hours of your time.

I've talked around it enough, but The Tiny Bang Story is a point-and-click adventure game with the occasional more mentally-intensive puzzle - say, sliding blocks, or Simon Says, or any number of classic puzzle formats that frequently make the rounds as hacking mini-games in larger enterprises - that follows Amanita Design's (they of Machinarium and Samorost fame) imperative of a dialogue-free, discovery-focused series of screens to poke around on to your heart's delight. The Tiny Bang Story errs more towards the hidden object regions of casual puzzle games, especially where the main goal is concerned: after the planet is fractured into puzzle pieces, it's the player's chief goal to recover them all from each area of the game and gradually put the world back together. Often this also requires collecting a series of objects to complete a puzzle, which then might provide more objects for a different puzzle. In each area of the game, usually around 4-5 screens of things to click on, there's the overarching goal of collecting jigsaw pieces, but also the more immediate and stage-specific goal of finding transport to the next area of the game: be that a ship that needs a key for its anchor, or an airplane that needs to be loaded with mail first, or a train that the player needs to construct with loose pieces in a garage.

The gameplay's about as basic as it gets, but the game is able to coast by on an atmosphere of unhurried calm. The planet might be lying around in pieces, but neither the tone of the game's gentle music or its sleepy inhabitants seem too broken up about it themselves. They'll give you help in exchange for fixing their immediate surroundings - often involving putting a portrait back together, or some other puzzle - and then giving you whatever quest items you need to move on. You get the impression that this sort of thing happens a lot, and people have just tuned it out for the most part.

Beyond the chill atmosphere and the simple puzzles, there's not a whole lot more to The Tiny Bang Story. Frankly, I wasn't really looking for a whole lot more. It's perhaps a step above the usual HOPAs I used to write about around here - the storybook aesthetic and detailed screens full of little hatches to open or buttons to click are charmingly cute, though there were a few puzzles that could've used more direction - but just as undemanding of a player that's not really in the mood to learn a whole bunch of systems or drop 20 hours grinding out some high-level equipment that particular day. As slight as it is, I'm glad games like The Tiny Bang Story are around to fill a quiet afternoon in an otherwise hectic week.

Rating: 4 out of 5.