A videogame feels truly successful when it tells a story that is only made possible by the choice of medium. Through enmeshing its story, aesthetic and overall premise into a seamlessly playable game world, its rules and conventions are laid out purely with interactivity in mind, as opposed to shoehorning some controls in at the end of a creative process to puppeteer the player from one cut-scene to the next. Stacking, as you’ll already have gathered from sneaking a peek down-right, is just such a videogame – a carefully-oiled engine of pure pleasure in which nary a second of its five or so hours is spent without experiencing some form of enjoyment, such is the charm in, above all, simply existing in the infectiously quirky sandbox world it paints.
Charlie Blackmore, then, is a Russian nesting doll. He lives in a small cottage with his chimney sweep family, in a dangerously totalitarian state ruled over by the machinations of the evil Baron. While his siblings are all dragged off into hard labour by the authorities after his father disappears, Charlie is deemed too small to be of any use. There’s nothing left except to overcome his modest stature and attempt a rescue.
Stacking simply revels in its own miniature art deco world. From its film-grain cut-scenes, noodling classical piano backing and florally-bordered subtitle cards to the subtler, incidental details of the environment, it’s a game that immediately delights through the simplest interaction. Each locale bustles with a cast of photorealistic wooden dolls, wandering up and down stairs, guarding doors or going about their work. Birdcages hang in corners, their tiny wooden occupants staring into the room with painted eyes. Prison doors are sealed by marker-penned padlocks, though accessible to the dimunitive Charlie through missing corners gnarled with the teethmarks of mice. Cruise ships sail against a painted sea, while on-deck miniature safari parks are patrolled by big game hunters taking aim at cardboard wildlife with pop-guns.
While the dolls are clearly living in this Revolutionist timewarp, their wider human-sized environment, replete with bobbins, matchbooks and candles, could belong to any child playing at Bolshevik revolution on their bedroom floor.
This Matryoshka-based world serves as perfect allegory for Stacking’s take on the classic story of an insignificant manual worker who eventually overthrows the corrupted authority. The size of the dolls work beautifully on several conceptual levels, at their simplest representing merely the scale of a family unit, from the giant father to the tiniest toddler, but then, more mischievously, also using a character’s size to reflect their social standing. A gigantic, moustacheoed braggart will loom over tiny, scuttling cleaning staff, bellowing at them to get out of his way, while a disinterested aristocrat towers silently over the lot, his station in life literally represented by his eyeline.
Charlie, however, possesses the unique power to undermine this prescribed social order in his ability to ‘stack’. Leaping into a doll of the next size up, and in doing so, taking control of them and whatever ability they’re gifted with, he can begin to upset the balance. On a basic level, this is how puzzles, problems and challenges are ovecome; if a guard won’t move from a locked door, stack into ‘the Widow Chastity’, – whose hip-swinging allure will win over menfolk with even the most steadfast constitution – and carry on your way.
The genius, however, and what puts Stacking’s gameplay on a par with the charm of its world, is that each of the game’s problems has several distinct solutions, veering delightfully between the routinely obvious and the highly experimental ‘this shouldn’t work, but I’ll try it anyway’ approach. For example, at the train station, there’s a kerfuffle at the ticket office. The office windows are at different heights to reflect the varying sizes of its wooden customers, but the exciteable rabble are bouncing around impatiently at the wrong kiosks. What to do? Immediately, it feels sensible to stack into each customer, and guide them to the correct places. But when you discover a certain chap whose skill is ‘A Proper Upppercut’, chancing the direct approach holds appeal; simply punching the passengers in the face until they move provides absolutely the same result, and again feeds beautifully into the playful allegory of social revoultion that permeates the game’s mood. In this case, the difference between organising people by way of an efficient bureaucratic process, or just beating them into submission.
Crucially, the above result can only be reached after visiting one of the game’s other levels, and it’s this dynamic that sees Stacking elevated beyond an enjoyable five-hour jaunt. You may have guessed that, with such a wild and varied cast of finely-painted characters wobbling around, there may be an impetus to collect ‘em all, and Stacking doesn’t disappoint, offering several reasons to see and do everything. Our uppercut man, for example, will only appear in the hub station after Charlie’s journeyed to a cruise ship, seeking to end its ‘neverending’ pleasure voyage in order to rescue a brother forced to spend his time scraping the vessel’s funnels clean. Along the way, each and every character stacked with will be added to the station, as well as into an interactive museum lovingly crafted by Charlie’s vagrant friend Eli in a back alley. Filling the enticingly vacant felt bases is one thing, but the bleeding effect of new dolls entering the world effectively turns Stacking into an intricate, game-wide jigsaw puzzle, each solution satisfying enough in itself, but bringing that added pleasure with the knowledge that each tiny success adds another contribution to the whole. There’s that allegory again.
Overall, Stacking is a near-perfect blend of design and gameplay. Our only complaint is that Double Fine seems almost unaware of the massive potential that lies within. Advanced stacking techniques, comprising a quick change between two compatible abilities, are only introduced in the game’s closing hour, and our mind began to fill with possible applications of ever-more complex stacks than even this. Frankly, we could play Stacking for 20 hours, and it’s just a shame we can’t. Roll on the inevitable DLC…
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