Nippets is the hand-drawn, hidden-object game from Blinkink designed to make you slow down and relax

Nippets is a game about people-watching, everyone’s favourite pastime. It’s what draws audiences to wimmelbooks, like Where’s Wally?, and hidden object video games – there’s something truly relaxing about the act of searching for little moments and meanings. In partnership with Uwu Biz, this new video game is developed and published by Blink Industries (the studio’s very first video game) and it invites the player into small narratives in a big city whilst capturing fleeting moments and bringing characters together. Led by Nicola Strina, an Italian indie game developer, and featuring the hand-drawn artwork of Frederikke Frydenlund, Nippets (a play-on-word of ‘snippets’) puts the player in omnipresent shoes and lets them observe the Nippets world, which is full of life and commotion.

“As a producer with a background in games, I can say that working in a studio who specialise in animation is quite simply the dream,” says Nicola. That’s what gives Nippets such a vibrant art style – it’s charming, hand-drawn and inviting. You’ve quite possibly never seen an isometric game in quite this fashion, nevermind a hidden object game. There’s an overarching story throughout, which doesn’t frustrate players with time pressures or the need to hit high scores. It’s simply a breeze. You can see characters grow up, get pregnant and start a family over the course of the entire game. Elsewhere, you can return lost balloons to crying children or find every cat in the Nippets city.

On the question of a ‘who is the main character’, in a game filled to the brim with interactive NPCs, Nicola says, “I don’t think we have one.” She continues: “We kept that loose on purpose, so you may simply recognise them [the characters] if you pay attention.” There is no Wally or Waldo, so the puzzle game prompts the player to create their own narratives. Nippets isn’t about blasting through the levels, it’s about partaking in observation. Just like how we people-watch in transient places like airports or city squares, we observe life and its many moving parts, imagining how it works and why it’s there. There’s an element of ‘sonder’ hidden in Nippets – the realisation that everyone’s lives are as deep and varied as one’s own.

Nicola is passionate about Itch.io, an open, community-driven digital platform specialising in indie video games, assets and tabletop games, where Nippets is hosted. Whereas creatives on TV shows or films keep hush hush until the time comes for a big reveal, video games are a much slower process – demos are critical to the success of a studio and as well as that, studios need to find audiences quickly. Because itch.io is free and easy to access, Nippets was able to grow quickly and freely – eventually getting to the top 100 games of all time and number one in the hidden-object category. A new demo is out now on Steam, where you can see how the game evolved from the first concept to the current “close-to-final” version.

The soundtrack can’t go unmentioned either – it’s warm, inviting and undeniably whimsical. It was produced by an in-house music division called Major Tom, which helped the Nippets team communicate between teams to create a relaxing experience. It’s remarkably effective, sounding like those ‘lofi beats to study and relax to’ mixes which became super popular in the late 2010s and through lockdown, where people used unintrusive music to help chill out. Against the click-clacks and tip-taps of the game’s sound design, which includes pigeon wings fluttering, the sound of snowballs smushing against other Nippet citizens and meowing cats, the world feels deeply lived-in, representing the macro sounds of cities inside the game’s microscopic world. “We wanted to lean on a relaxing experience, a way to slow down from the everyday frenzy, the doom scrolling, the excessiveness of the news. Just boot up Nippets, get a glass of wine and enjoy it,” says Nicola.