“Everything will be okay. I have a sticker on my laptop that says that.”
– Sharon Van Etten
There have been a lot of games about stickers within the last few years. I can understand it: there’s satisfaction in collecting them, placing them, and displaying a bit of yourself through them. I’m one of those people who ends up hoarding them because nothing you can put them on will last longer than the sticker itself. It makes sense that I’d be attracted to games about stickers instead. I get to collect them (I will never not love a collectathon), I can put them wherever the game allows, and they never go to waste. The freedom to make anything and everything into a sticker is what attracted me to Pilo and the Holobook.
Visuals
For a game based around making stickers, you need to have one important element to the visuals. Everything needs to stand out. For the most part, Pilo and the Holobook succeeds here. Even the dark planets have their own level of brightness so you can see what you’re doing. The levels are filled with strange and vibrant objects to scan, though some of them may not immediately seem like things you could or should. When the Professor says to scan everything, he means everything. Even the things hidden under sand or in wells. Luckily, you don’t have to see it to scan it.
I am however deducting a point because of a pet peeve I have with games: overuse of foreground elements. In adding foreground elements to add depth, you often end up hiding things behind them. In a game where you often have to rub against the walls to find every possible thing to scan (or at least I did, some are right at the edge of your scanning range), foreground elements can often get in the way.
Audio
The music is pleasantly… there. It’s not bombastic or dramatic. Neither terrible nor amazingly memorable. It’s just background music exactly as it should be: adding atmosphere without being overwhelming or distracting. There’s no voice acting, but the characters do have sound effects, not overused, that give a bit of personality. An inquisitive old man. An excited young boy. A world-weary traveler. They fit a lot into a simple “Hmm” or a laugh. It’s just a nice game to listen to.
Narrative
Pilo is a little humanoid red panda raised by and apprenticed to Professor Chiron, an only slightly mad scientist determined to prove his worth to the local science symposium. He’s converted the house to a spaceship and flown them all to a nearby system. Then he hands Pilo a holobook, another invention that catalogues everything it scans, and tells him to have fun.
The planets are…fairly empty. There are a few animals here and there, but the most prominent things are ruins and a horrible purple substance Pilo names Tar. The Tar burns whatever it touches, a permanent, aching, flaming scar that even Pilo can’t touch. It’s also in his way. If Pilo and the Professor want to catalogue everything about these planets, they’ll have to find a cure. It’s a simple story with a touch of the currently-popular environmental messaging, but nothing too heavy-handed. It’s also nothing we haven’t seen before.
Gameplay
The gameplay in Pilo and the Holobook is simple: run around a variety of planets with your Holobook, scanning anything and everything you can find to make stickers and catalogue evidence that you’ve been to alien planets. There are no monsters out to hurt you, no dangers around corners.
As I said earlier, you are meant to scan everything. Luckily, once you’ve scanned a certain type of object, every future scan of similar things will result in a checkmark clearly saying “okay, you’ve got this already.” Get used to seeing it, you’re going to be very familiar with it while looking for the last things you didn’t scan. There’s allegedly an upgrade to the holobook that is supposed to help you find things yet to be scanned. I got it. I never actually figured out how it worked. Even standing in front of an unscanned object and rotating around, I couldn’t tell what was different.
Size Matters
Between scanning everything, there are small but simple puzzles to progress, like finding secrets hidden in a desert and arranging stickers in a specific way in your book. Pay attention to some smaller details and the buttons available to you (one puzzle took me a hot minute to realize I could rotate the stickers) and you won’t find them too challenging, but still satisfying.
Regrettably, and a point off for me, Pilo and the Holobook is a small game. When you blast off into space, you may be thinking there are multiple galaxies to explore and dozens of planets. Big dreams dampened by the realization that no, it’s just four planets in one little galaxy. It feels like there was room to grow that was left unused.
Accessibility
Despite my complaints about the length of the game, I have to admit, this is, like many of the games I’ve reviewed, a game for kids. A simple premise with simple controls and a story and characters kids can relate to. The camera is fixed, so no getting lost with which way is up. You don’t have to remember a bunch of different buttons to make the holobook interact differently with the world. One button to use the book, one button to open the book. It couldn’t be easier.
Replayability
Regrettably but not surprisingly, Pilo and the Holobook is a one-and-done kind of game. If you only do the bare minimum of scanning to continue the story, you may be able to get another hour after the credits roll. If you’re like me and try to find everything before you move on, clean-up may not even be required. There’s also no difficulty levels to change things up.
If you’re an achievement hunter and dedicated scanner, you’ll get most achievements casually over the course of the game. Right now, there’s one missable one where if you don’t scan a certain character who disappears when you get close, you won’t be able to complete your holobook. I don’t consider this a positive form of replayability. However, the devs report working on a fix for this, so with a little patience, you won’t have to start the game all over to 100% it.
Uniqueness
As I said at the start, there have been several games about stickers released within the last few years. From what I can tell, none of them play exactly the same. Some you make stickers, others you place them to navigate an overworld. There are surprisingly few games (to my knowledge) that just appreciate collecting stickers for the sake of collecting.
Personal
I said it before, I’ve said it many times in many other reviews: I love collectathons. Pilo and the Holobook is about as pure a distillation of the concept of collecting as you’re ever going to find. No survival, no combat, just running around and finding every possible sticker in the universe. While I desperately wish it had been longer, I’m satisfied with what we got: puzzles that require a little bit of attention and are satisfying to beat, cute and lighthearted characters that made me smile to interact with, and tons of stickers to collect.
Special thanks to Mudita and RedDeer Games for supplying us with a copy of Pilo and the Holobook for this review.
Maggie Maxwell spends most of her days buried in her fiction writing, only coming up for air to dive into the escapism of video games, cartoons, or movies. She can usually be found on Twitter as @wanderingquille and @MaxNChachi or streaming on Twitch with her husband, also as MaxNChachi.
