It’s incredibly heartening to see a bizarre, quirky game not get crushed under the weight of its concept – something that seemingly happens far too often with games of this sort. Stacking neatly avoids this trap by focusing on providing interesting gameplay that complements, rather than distracts, from the world the game creates.
And that world – an industrialized, alternate-universe turn of the 20th century populated entirely by matryoshka dolls and heavily indebted to the language of silent films – is perhaps what sold me so quickly on Stacking. Tim Schafer (the head of Double Fine) has had some delightfully bizarre settings in his games before (see Psychonauts or his work on Grim Fandango for proof of that), but the way that Stacking seems to almost play with many of the same subversive tropes present in the films of Guy Maddin – as well as the penchant for So! Many! Excited! Title cards! – makes the game completely hilarious and a joy just to play around in.
The game casts you as Charlie Blackmore, the smallest of the Blackmore clan of chimney-sweeping matryoshka dolls, and quite possible the smallest nesting doll in the world. After the nefarious Baron kidnaps Charlie’s siblings to put to work in various child labour positions, Charlie sets out to rescue all of them and put an end to child slavery.
If all the game had was its setup, it’d probably still be worth playing if only to witness the sheer strangeness of it all. Thankfully, though, Double Fine was generous enough to also make Stacking a pretty brilliant puzzle game. Charlie’s special ability – being able to enter any matryoshka doll one size bigger than him – allows him to be able to find solutions to the various problems the game throws at him. Each doll that Charlie inhabits has a special ability of their own, which can range from silly little timewasters like being able to slap people around, to abilities tailor-made for the solution of any given puzzle. It’s never done in an obvious way, though I often found myself smacking myself on the forehead and thinking “why didn’t I think of that before?”
The game will often have you attempting to ruin parties, put an end to art displays, and generally cause mayhem in a way that actually makes a certain amount of sense, given the game’s penchant for off-kilter situations. This was perhaps what impressed me most about Stacking – it’s essentially a third-person adventure game but never resorts to violence as a means of progression. The game is all about using your cerebral instincts to overcome challenges, and while that shouldn’t be such a rarity, it’s almost kind of revelatory here.
If I had one criticism of the game, it’s that on occasion, the solutions are just a little too straightforward. This isn’t so much the case towards the end of the game, but I think that Double Fine figured that since Stacking doesn’t really play like any other game on the market, gamers would have a tougher time figuring out its nuances. Things like objective pathfinders and the hint system are never forced on you, but the game almost seems to make up for that by making a few of the puzzles a bit facile. Once again, not a consistent criticism of the whole game, but something I noticed in isolated incidents.
Stacking is every bit the game that Double Fine can and should be making – a logical progression of the work Schafer did on Grim Fandango twelve years earlier. When a revered developer delivers such a rich, wonderful world tied to such an interesting and original game, there’s not really any way to compete against that, is there?
Note: this review was originally published, in abbreviated form, in the Carillon, the University of Regina Students' Newspaper.