Tiny Whiny Island is a game about being the new postman on a small island. The island requires that letters are delivered directly to their recipients, so every day you ride around on your bike to track down a handful of people and give them a letter. There are some collectibles to find along the way, and you need to make it back to the post office at the end of the day. That’s the whole game.
Lots of games can be described in a very simple way like that, but most of them offer some kind of twist on the experience to keep you interested. Tiny Whiny Island attempts to do this in a few ways, but none of them really help. You can peak at the letters before you deliver them, and you may as well since there are no consequences for doing it, but most of the letters are randomly generated drivel and the others are explained by the dialogue you’d get after delivering them anyway. One letter every day kicks off a bit of a mini quest for you to resolve, but since you’re still just biking over to people and talking to them, it doesn’t actually change the experience at all. The only thing that does feel different is going for collectibles. There are a few different types and they’re scattered all over the place, so going for all of them could extend the game’s playtime a lot, but as far as I know there’s no reward for doing so. It’d be hard to recommend doing that over playing any other collectathon game.
The story still could have been a saving grace, but there’s not much to talk about there, either. The overall story of being a postman goes literally nowhere. Your character has no motivations and no troubles, and the game ends without developing him at all. The story you do get comes entirely from the mini quests you get on each of the four days, but these are all extremely trite and predictable, so they’re unlikely to hold your attention.
Conclusion
To be fair to Tiny Whiny Island, it is only asking for $4, so it was never going to be a terribly huge game. But even for $4, 45 minutes of bland exploration and flat writing just isn’t a good return. This feels more like a prologue demo release to a larger game or a free student project game.
Rating: 50%
Time to beat: 45 minutes
Price: $4
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