Stacking Review

"Babooshka, Babooshka, Babooshka-ya-ya", as Kate Bush once sang. Have you ever found yourself wondering what it must be like to be a babushka (or matryoshka to give them their correct name) nesting doll? No, neither have I; but it would appear the folks over at Double Fine have had that very thought.

That thought has subsequently evolved into Stacking; a puzzle adventure casting you as Charlie Blackmore, the youngest (and by definition, smallest) of a family of matryoshka. With the Blackmore family split up by the dastardly Baron, it's up to Charlie to rescue his siblings from slavery and track down his missing father. Set against the backdrop of Industrialisation - with a world ruled by coal and steam, and fueled by child labour; the story is played out through a series of silent-film style cutscenes, complete with film reel effect, painted backdrops and dialog presented on title cards.

Aside from squeezing through a few small gaps, tiny Charlie is no match for the Baron or his many henchmen. Thankfully, Charlie can stack with the multitude of larger dolls that inhabit the world and use their individual abilities to solve the problems encountered along the way. There are a couple of catches to this system however; you can only stack with dolls one size bigger than the current one, and the abilities in question are ones that probably wouldn't be at the top of the list when determining the skill-set required to defeat an evil megalomaniac - abilities such as belching, farting, screaming, playing tag and seducing are just an example of those found in the first level alone.

Tim Schafer's adventure game heritage shines through in most areas of the game, right down to the story telling and humour persisting through the game. The puzzles themselves are also classic adventure game fare, both in terms of the setup and the quirkiness of some of the solutions - many wouldn't look out of place with a point and click interface and a list of verbs at the bottom of the screen.

Whilst there are only a handful of challenges per level, longevity is introduced by the fact that each puzzle has multiple solutions using different combinations of the available dolls. None of the puzzles are likely to leave players completely clueless as to how to solve them; the challenge is in finding 4 or 5 different solutions for each one. If stuck, talking to nearby dolls will often provide subtle clues, and the menu contains a hint system which, if necessary, will tell players how to complete the puzzle, with no penalty for usage other than the player's pride.

In addition to this, there are also additional mini-tasks, referred to as "Hi-jinks", requiring repeated use of certain dolls' abilities; and a collectible element involving stacking with all of the unique dolls within a level, not all of which are required to complete all of the puzzle solutions. Each level contains one or more sets of matching dolls, such as a family of magicians on one level; stacking all of the set together unlocks a brief cutscene about the set.

You might expect the characters to appear somewhat, well, wooden given their solid construction and the lack of vocals (a handful somehow manage to produce sounds for their abilities, such as the occasional "Make way!" or "Good day sir!" but other than that all dialog is in text form only); but what the dolls lack in polygons and skeletal animation, they more than make up for with fine details such as the hand painted nature of the textures and the way in which different dolls move in different manners.

This detail carries through to the environments as well, with the combination of grand architecture, lavish furnishings and steam driven machinery fitting the theme and setting perfectly. On closer inspection however, you soon notice that whilst a lot of the scenery appears to have been created by the inhabitants of the game world, there are elements of real-world items on the same scale as the dolls - one level features ice lolly sticks as flooring, whilst another has cocktail olives being used as decorative plants.

Some might complain that Stacking is a little too easy or short, but in reality, the pace and the length feel just right for what one would expect from PSN/XBLA title. At the same time, the game never outstays its welcome; I feel that if the game was much longer, the otherwise unique gameplay mechanic would start to become stale and the game overall would lose a lot of its charm.