Puppet Theater · Plinka

Every puppet hangs from real strings. Pull an arm and the whole body answers. Play the show back and you hear your child's voice. Every joint has its own spring, the way a wooden marionette does. A show opens with three bells, and when it ends the audience applauds, the puppets bow, and the credits roll with a portrait of everyone in it. That is the whole app: your child works the puppets, does all the voices, and names the theater on the sign. Nothing can be lost, nothing runs out, no points, no stars. And your child is never asked to buy anything — the one buy button sits behind a parental gate. ON STAGE One tap and a puppet dances. Your child pulls an arm, a leg, or the whole puppet across the stage. Lifted by one foot it hangs upside down, and every character takes that differently. A finger held still on a puppet opens a ring of tricks and faces: laugh, cry, sleep, sneeze, turn a somersault. The stage tracks every finger, so two children can each hold a puppet. The characters notice one another. The wolf follows the ballerina. The ghost hides behind the dragon when the thunder starts. When one puppet dances, the others bounce along. A finger on the empty stage lights a firefly the whole cast turns to watch. The props answer too, and answer differently in the dark, in the cold, underwater and on the moon. A ball that lands on the trampoline starts bouncing on its own; a teddy carried to the bed gets tucked in. THINGS TO FIND The theater does not explain most of what it can do. Instead a little prompter turns up and mimes one idea at a time — for the four-year-old who cannot read yet — and only something that would work right now. On the moon it mimes something else. RECORD A SHOW Your child taps Record, plays with the puppets and tells the story at the same time. On playback the theater puts the right puppets back in the right world and runs it again. The voice can come out squeaky, deep or like a robot. The recording stays on the device; nothing is uploaded. Story cards offer an idea when imagination stalls: "The dragon has hiccups and can't stop…" A show of up to a minute and a half can be saved as a movie with your child's voice on it. That goes through the parental gate: a grown-up decides whether it stays on the device or gets shown to anyone. THE PUPPET WORKSHOP Your child builds their own puppets: head, body shape, clothes, hat, hairstyle, pattern, something in the hand, something on the back. 161 options that combine any way at all. The extras include a backpack, a pair of wings, a hearing aid and a cane, and there are ten skin tones. A face can come from the camera or your photo library; it never leaves the device. The finished puppet gets a name and moves into the Puppet Box. WHAT IS IN THE THEATER · 26 puppets and 55 things to put on stage · 9 worlds and 3 vehicles to drive: train, rocket and car · 18 backdrops, from a fairy forest to the seabed · 31 sound effects, 6 music loops and a xylophone to play · 50 story cards, 13 tricks and 11 faces in the ring · 9 narrator voices, and 14 languages WHAT YOU GET The app is free and genuinely playable that way: ten puppets, twenty props, one world, one vehicle, every backdrop, every sound, every story card and the whole record-and-play-back feature. One purchase unlocks the rest — the workshop, the other characters, all the worlds, all the props, and painting a backdrop of your own. It sits behind the parental gate: a two-digit multiplication you type in. No subscription, no ads, no third-party code, no analytics, no data collection. Playing needs no internet connection; only the purchase does. BEHIND THE SCENES Every line and every sound is computed in code — not one image or audio file in the app apart from the icon. It works as well on a plane as it does at home. With VoiceOver each puppet is announced by name, a double tap opens the same ring of tricks, and a child who cannot see can light the firefly and hear the cast wake up.