Stacking

Y’know how Bungie makes Halo and Rare makes family games? Double Fine are either a game company who make unique games or a game company nobody purchases off. They made Psychonauts, one of my all-time favourite adventure games about a school for psychics. They also made Brutal Legend, which was a terrible, terrible RTS with an amazing story, art style, soundtrack, performances and collectibles. The game featured Lemmy, Ozzy and Rob Halford for peats sake. I am to this day undecided whether it’s one of the best games ever made or a disaster.

It would appear the video game buying public has some kind of aversion to awesome though and nobody bought them. For this reason Double Fine has scaled down to make eccentric arcade titles. The first; Costume Quest, was a very funny turn based RPG but was far too easy. I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy it, but I know full well that money could have stretched a lot further.

Stacking, however, is well worth the £10 I paid for it. It follows a child Russian doll during the industrial revolution who possess’ bigger dolls with unique powers to solve puzzles. Again, the art style and tone are spot on, the only disappointment was the cut scenes are really laboured and not at all funny. The game is dotted with funny little sight gags though and I still had a good dozen chuckles with my time playing it. The game has a playful silliness, even if I rarely audibly laughed I spent nearly every second amused and interested

The twist is there are only 30 or so puzzles, but each has 5 solutions. The game clearly directs you to find all of the solutions, ranging from straightforward to the downright bizarre and inventive. If you ever get stuck there is a “hint” system which means you’ll never need to consult a browser when playing, but there is a cool down time in between.

Stacking is a game brimful of heart, humour and wit; which in its own right makes it unique on today’s market. The difficulty will amuse the bright and won’t bludgeon the dim and the playtime is definite value for money. Be unlike the videogame sheep today and checkout this unique little adventure.