Put on your thinking caps, people. In your vast collective gaming knowledge, can you think of any one game that mixes Victorian-era references to black lung and child-labor strikes with flatulence jokes and the ability to toss bananas at monkeys riding steam-powered bikes? No? Well, we couldn’t either. But now we have one, in the form of Stacking, an inventive puzzler that fits comfortably within Live Arcade’s adventurous format.
As a tiny Russian stacking doll named Charlie Blackmore, your goal is to free your older siblings from a fate spent toiling away in old-timey doom-and-gloom factories run by a black-hearted Baron. To do so, you’ll rely on Charlie’s unique ability to “stack” with progressively bigger dolls to exploit their special skills across four environments, ranging from a bustling train station to a luxury steamboat and beyond.
Each location has specific challenges to overcome, each with multiple solutions. For instance, aboard a stuffy, rich-people-only zeppelin, your goal is to free a handful of ambassadors opposed to child labor. If you succeed, your sister Abigail will be set free from the Baron’s backbreaking engine-room work. But getting from Point A to Point B can involve plenty of intermediary tasks. Liberating one trapped ambassador will require you to lift a certain gate. You can hop into an Engineer doll and use his Maintain ability to activate specific panels to lower a lever shaped like a hand. You can then take control of a gentlemanly-looking doll who has the power of Firm Handshake to seal the deal on the lever, which springs open the gate. That’s only one of the three to five solutions that this puzzle, like the rest of them, possesses; and while finding one solution is no sweat, getting all of them (as you’re encouraged to do) takes some mental heavy lifting.
At first, Stacking’s strange, sideways approach to puzzle-solving left us scratching our heads. On top of each location’s main story puzzle, you can also optionally “stack with” dozens of unique dolls, take part in a list of what the game calls “Hijinks” (e.g., smack X number of dolls with the “Slap with Glove” ability), and complete bonus missions after the main quest is done. It’s a lot of value in such a small package, but the sometimes overly precious presentation can be befuddling at times, making Stacking an experience best savored by gamers predisposed to cutesy cleverness.
+ Hugely original premise with lots of tender loving care in the details.
+ Very clever gameplay, with puzzles that have multiple solutions.
- At times, relies too heavily on quirky presentation; some objectives are too obtuse.
? Can the ability to “Sip Tea” ever really come in handy for anyone?
