Overview
How exactly stickers work, how to bypass glitched stickers and all sticker locations.
Introduction
After looking through a bunch of discussion posts about the game’s collectibles, it seems that many people have some misconceptions preventing them from collecting all stickers. After doing some testing and collecting all stickers for myself, I think I have a good understanding of how they actually work and what people are struggeling with.
I’ll explain exactly how the stickers work, then go over how this helps us to circumvent glitched sticker locations and lastly link to a guide with all locations stickers can be found at. Please read everything, I tried to keep it brief.
How the system works
Most people seem to think that each sticker has a set location. However, according to the developers, things are a little more complicated than that.
First off, the sticker you get at any given location won’t be a specific one, so if you’re missing a certain number it may be anywhere in the game.
It’s possible that the order in which you unlock stickers is consistent, i.e. the nth sticker found in a new save game will always be the same number. This suspicion stems from the fact that the last sticker I found was the second half of Tim Thorpe, whose description text describes part if the gaem’s ending (yes, it somehow contains the future) and would thus spoil it, if Thorpe were to be completed early on by the player.
Maybe it was just a coindidence (in which case I really hope Thorpe’s text is shortened until you beat the game). If you can confirm or deny this, please let me know.
Secondly, there are more locations than there are stickers to be found, with the 100 stickers overall having 160 possible locations to appear in. Each area has a set number of stickers and set locations they may appear at. The locations that are actually used are randomized with each playthrough, meaning you may find stickers in locations that were empty in previous attempts and there will be empty locations even when none of the stickers were found yet.
Also worth noting is that the stickers don’t have to be collected in a single playthrough to fill the album and get the achievements, so missing some isn’t a big problem.
Bypassing glitched sticker locations
While I don’t really get why the developers choose to make the collectible distribuion so elaborate (according to their guide they didn’t want players sharing the locations for some reason), this behaviour actually helps us to get around glitched stickers.
Should you come across a sticker you can’t collect, simply take note of the area it is in and on a new playthrough look through all possible locations in this area. Chances are that the sticker will have moved to another location where it can be collected.
Currently there are also phantom stickers at certain locations. These can’t be picked up and aren’t actual stickers, meaning they will still appear if all stickers are collected. The two I’m aware off are in the gym, one on the ground to the left of Dunn’s office and one behind the boxes to the right of it.
All possible sticker locations
The developers of the game actually provide a guide listing all possible sticker locations. It seems to have been used as an internal reference during development and is thus a little messy, but the guide contains pictures of all sticker location. Some minor changes were made to the game world in some of these places after the pictures were taken, but the spots are the same and can be found easily
Link to the developers’ guide[dl1.anuman.fr]
Note: The guide divides each area into sub sections for better usability, however these are irrelevant for the system placing the stickers. So if you’re trying to get previously glitched stickers, look through the entire area, not just the sub area the sticker was in previously.
Thanks for reading
I hope I could clear up any confusion and help you. Feel free to tell me if I got anything wrong or missed a mechanic.
