InsaneBear

Review: Stacking

Score: Mediocre
Difficulty played on: No difficulty options
Time to beat: 7 hours for close to 100% completion
Loved the most: Unique and consistent aesthetic direction.
Hated the most: Either the utter lack of anything remotely funny (coming from Double Fine!) or the most annoying title screen music I’ve ever heard.

Hot of the (roller) heels of October’s delightful Costume Quest, Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Studios has released one of the most aesthetically original games in the history of the industry with Stacking, a game based on Russian Matryoshka dolls. The gamble pays off with one of the most authentic and quirky game-worlds you’ll ever occupy, but unlike the developer’s previous foray into the downloadable market, Stacking just doesn’t have enough fun or funny to support the unique world. Simply put, this title doesn’t “stack up” to the Double Fine standard we’ve come to know, and it has me sincerely concerned for the quality of their next game.

But we’re all here to talk about this game, so allow me to fill you in on Stacking‘s background. You play as Charlie Blackmore, the world’s smallest nesting doll. Your poor and over-breeding family relies on Blackmore Family Chimney Sweeps for income, boldly advertising, “Ain’t no mess we can’t address!” But when the evil Baron kidnaps your lovable father for reasons I’m still unclear on, as well as all your brothers and sisters who try to save him, it’s up to you, the runt of the family, to clean the mess up. As you might have guessed, the only way to do this is by stacking into larger dolls and using their unique abilities to solve a great many puzzles.

From the moment you press start at the title screen Stacking immerses you in another world; cut-scenes play out on a theatrical stage with a grainy visual filter and the checkered edges of a running film reel lining the sides of the screen, all complemented by the tick-tick-ticking of an old-timey projector in the background. Lines of dialogue further mimic this silent film style and are delivered on text screens. The whole vibe is very deliberate and suits the morally simplistic narrative quite well.

As for the game-world itself, hordes of finely detailed Matryoshka dolls bustle here and there–bothering other dolls, looking for matching dolls that complete the family set, standing around for you to crawl inside of them–in four distinct locations. Most of these colorful, limbless toys have distinguishing personalities that shine through in their supremely animated hops and hobbles. They really do feel like people occupying a living world despite their hollow, soulless shell-bodies. It’s also kind of a creepy, yet satisfying touch that you can see the smaller dolls nested inside the larger ones whenever their halves split open to walk or talk (through text, of course) or gawk.

The four locales these artfully painted citizens occupy aren’t quite as lively as their intricate inhabitants, but they look good enough and manage to offer a nice amount of variety. The fun-loving cruise ship constituting the second world is probably the most visually diverse and appealing of the group, but it could be argued that it’s just the most appealing level as a whole.

Regardless of the environment, Stacking‘s sounds do just enough to keep the world alive; there’s no voice acting to speak of, dolls’ special abilities are accompanied by serviceable but forgettable sound effects, and the score tends to fade into the back of your head until a cut-scene comes along. The cut-scenes are generally enhanced by more memorable audio, but the core gameplay’s sound isn’t anything to write to the InsaneBear Audio of the Year voters about.

Unfortunately for those of us that judge a game on more than its visuals, the lack-luster quality of the audio can describe the core gameplay too. Every level tasks you with solving a few puzzles by way of possessing specific dolls for their unique abilities before you can move past the arbitrary roadblock of the moment. You might have to distract a guard with a voluptuous lady doll in order to sneak into a party; take control of a sea-sick youngster to toss your cookies on some important maps; utilize an opera singer’s sizable lungs to suck in some toxic gases. Every puzzle calls for a unique solution offered by a unique doll.

You’ll only have to solve each level’s puzzles once to pass on, but every single challenge has multiple solutions that utilize different dolls and different tactics. For some reason, though, Double Fine inexplicably chooses to render this promising variety meaningless by offering nothing more than an underdeveloped art gallery (you can’t even take control of the camera to zoom in or move around) as reward for thorough puzzle-solving. I don’t care how cute these little foreign pieces of junk are; staring at the dozens I’ve collected doesn’t really make total completion worth-while.

You might be questioning why I need some sort of tangible reward for discovering every solution to every puzzle. Shouldn’t the thrill of solving the puzzle be reward enough? Well, it should, but it’s not. To put it bluntly, Stacking is a boring game. I think I’ve felt more clever solving cross-word puzzles than the mundane problems presented by the evil Baron. Sure, there are some that you probably won’t get without using the hint system, but that’s because some of the solutions are so obscure; I certainly wouldn’t call them a satisfying challenge. And even if you do know exactly how to solve the problem at hand, it can often be a hassle finding the doll you need to use. The problems finally get a little more complex in the final third of the game, calling for specific combinations of dolls (like a water-spraying doll and one that blows cold air so you can freeze an enemy), but things never get adequately complicated. The gameplay is really the modern equivalent of Lucasarts’ classic Point-and-Click Adventure games, but without any of the humor that made them bearable.

And that’s truly Stacking‘s greatest downfall. The game is clearly designed for children, but that is no excuse. I’ve played plenty of kids’ games that made me laugh out loud; I didn’t even chuckle with this boring excuse to complete menial task after menial task. I’m sorry, but if Double Fine has resorted to a pathetic variety of fart jokes for laughs, then I need to re-evaluate my opinion of the studio. Even the cut-scenes couldn’t get a smirk out of me because all they do is harp on how evil the Baron is and how bad child labor is. Thanks for the heads-up, guys! I was considering putting my three-year-old niece to work until little Charlie Blackmore reminded me that adults just don’t know what we’re doing and that we should listen to what the kids want. Where would we be without their guidance? Oh, and don’t forget the hobos! They’re so wise we surely couldn’t get on without them.

It goes without saying that a game like this doesn’t offer much value. $15 will net you no more than eight hours of gameplay, and if you’re not an irrationally obsessive completionist, that number is probably closer to four hours. There’s no point in repeating puzzles you’ve already solved, especially when they aren’t particularly fun in the first place, and there’s not a single laugh to return to. The only conceivable reason to revisit the world of Stacking is to clear out the achievements, but I was honestly so bored by the end of this tiresome exercise in tedium that I can’t bring myself to spend the extra twenty minutes it’d take to max out my score.

I don’t want to keep beating a dead horse here, but I cannot emphasize enough how disappointing this is coming from Double Fine. Humor is what makes Point-and-Click adventure games work, and I fully expected Tim Schafer’s studio to bring that in spades to this modern, 3D take on the old genre. But the fact is that there’s nothing funny about the game, it’s boring, doesn’t challenge in a satisfying way, and gives a bad name to kids’ games. The one redeeming value is the bold and daring aesthetic that pairs Matryoshka dolls and silent films. It amazes me that such a notion was ever green-lit, and I simply must commend that risk-taking…I just wish I could have commended it through empty forum posts and not my $15.

Author: Cody

Tags: double fine, insanebear, psn, review, stacking, thq, xbla