Stacking Review - Miniature World, Full-Size Fun

We could use more games like Stacking. It’s charming, original, fun, and the perfect size for its ideas. Imagine Portal but with Russian nesting dolls. 

Double Fine’s latest downloadable morsel learns important lessons from the Portal school of game design. For a small fraction of full retail price, it delivers a compact experience that’s a good value without overstaying its welcome. It lasts long enough to charm you into loving it, but no longer. 

The question of value is one of the biggest issues the gaming industry is currently facing. Games can last anywhere between five minutes and hundreds of hours while costing as little as a dollar or as much as sixty. In other words, we spend a lot of time thinking about how much our games are worth these days and there’s no easy answers.

What is clear is that you don’t see many games like Portal. These gaming middle children, so to speak, can provide a dose of originality not possible with expensive games that have to play it safe while offering bigger budget thrills than what’s possible in the bargain bucket. 

The industry needs more great titles in this category, but it’s hard to find a place for them. Downloadable gems such as Limbo are leading the way in this area and Stacking will surely soon find its way into the hearts of many gamers as well for the same reasons as others of its ilk. Its concise tale packs the charm and satisfaction of a game many times its price.

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Best of the Decade: Psychonauts

Psychonauts

Platforms: Xbox, Xbox 360, Playstation 2, Windows

Release Date: April 19, 2005 (Xbox version)

Publisher: Majesco Entertainment

Developer: Double Fine Productions

I’m still plagued with Gamer Guilt because of this game. I’ve supported many an underdog of a title in my time. I’m proud of my early purchase of Beyond Good & Evil, even before the price entered its deadly spiral downward after only a few weeks on shelves. I’m proud to have purchased Amplitude, giving me a small part in supporting the brilliant minds at Harmonix that eventually gave us Guitar Hero and Rock Band. 

Psychonauts, sadly, is the one that slipped away.

I rented Psychonauts, though at this point I can only vaguely remember when. I seem to recall it avoiding my radar for some months when finally I tried it on a whim. I devoured it during that rental period and fell in love, but I never properly gave my money to the game. To this day, the only copy I have is a beaten up used Xbox disc I’m lucky to have even found. I know my single purchase wouldn’t have made a difference, especially months after it had been released, but I can’t help it. I feel bad because this masterpiece deserved better, from both myself and the rest of the gaming community. Becoming a cult classic is small comfort when your game is a retail failure.

The nature of gaming doesn’t mesh well with comedy. The two forces seem to be diametrically opposed. On the one hand you have humor, which relies on precise, guided timing. On the other hand you have gaming, which is controlled by the player and in which anything could happen at any time according to the whims of the human holding the controller. Perhaps you can see the fundamental problem. Outside of stuffing funny dialog into cutscenes here and there, which are conveniently outside the player’s control, few games even attempt to be humorous. It’s exceedingly difficult and results in failure more often than success. 

Take the recent game DeathSpank, for example. It tries to parody the hack-and-slash adventure game while relying on the tired tropes it’s lampooning in its dialog. Listening to the chatter between missions is funny, but mashing the attack button thousands of times and completing monotonous fetch quests is not. In other words, like many games that have attempted humor, DeathSpank wraps a layer of lighthearted icing around a fundamentally mediocre action game cake. 

There are a select few games that get the combo right. These elite few manage to work the gameplay and the environment into the humor. Conker’s Bad Fur Day is one, taking players through a hilarious romp around a cartoony platformer world gone horribly wrong. Portal is another, with GLaDOS’ snarky dialog making you laugh even as you incinerate your dear friend the Companion Cube. Psychonauts belongs in the pantheon of titles that manage to get it right. 

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First Impressions : Costume Quest

Costume Quest (XBLA, PSN)

Publisher: THQ

Developer: Double Fine

Release Date: October 19, 2010

Date of Play: October 19, 2010

Double fine has a bit of a troubled history when it comes to the sales of its stellar titles. Its wonderful blend of humor, original gameplay concepts, and terrific writing produces games that are critically acclaimed, but don’t sell all that well. This is a shame because Tim Schafer and company produce games that every gamer should be able to play and love and cherish.

With Costume Quest, Double Fine begins a new adventure into the realm of downloadable games. Potentially, this could be a match made in heaven. It allows Double Fine to express its wonderful weirdness in a more compact, cheaper form. Games such as these are less expensive both for the company to produce and for the consumer to purchase. This lower cost of entry has worked well for other downloadable titles that veer from the safety of the mainstream, so it could be the perfect fit for Double Fine’s unique brand of entertainment. Should this venture work out, not only might Schafer’s company have a brighter future ahead of it, but we might get to see more frequent releases from the company as well.

Can Costume Quest manage to condense the wonderment brought on by Psychonauts and Brütal Legend into a package that feels both worthy of the company’s history and of your $15? Let’s find out.

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