Stacking extends its winning formula with a new adventure, locations and dolls. More of the same is often a derogatory term, but here it's exactly what the (game) doctor ordered.

After the success of the original downloadable title, Stacking, a follow-up adventure has been crafted for release. The Lost Hobo King is a new add-on that takes Charlie to the kingdom of Camelfoot to help his hobo friend Levi with an important family matter.
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Staking Announced
Costume Quest (360)

Stacking 360: An arts and culture journalist interviews a film director about Russian dolls, budgets and petit pois.

Unlike so many superhero stories, which need to start with an origin, the recent movie that Thor: God of Thunder derives from is about the Asgardian gods, who have been living their mythic lives for centuries. This leaves plenty of potential for a prequel drawing both from Norse mythology and the Marvel comics interpretation of that mythology, and that's exactly what Sega have done with this game.
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Stacking didn't have me rushing to get under the skin of its nested dolls concept. Once inside though I found an intuitive and enjoyably challenging non-linear adventure that redefined my expectations.

I ended up being more and more impressed with Stacking as I got into it, despite the fact that initially I was unimpressed. I didn't know a great deal about the game beforehand and I personally found that the opening cinematic took too long to play out its silent-movie-style introduction. My other half was sitting with me as I played it and her response was similar: "goes on a bit doesn't it? When do you get to play?" Then, once the story was established and the inevitable tutorial character finally let me go and do something by myself I found the first few quests in the train station felt a bit thin and not particularly rewarding.
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Stacking is an unsettling mesh of industrial revolution, socialism and stacking Russian dolls. However, it's the layered solutions to each puzzle and wonderfully simple interface that really makes this something special.

It would be terrifying for me to lose my family. The idea of them being taken and not knowing their fate would torment me, so the beginning of Stacking came as something of a shock. Silent movie styled cut scenes frame the introduction well, but its jaunty tone sits in contradiction to the horror of a young boy, Charlie, watching as his siblings are taken into slavery by an evil Baron. This would be too much for any normal child, but Charlie is far from normal and without a thought the tiny hero sets off to retrieve his family.
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This week we talk about Stacking's compact gameplay, open structure and paradoxical mix of sinister fun.

Before the tape started rolling, here are our scribbled notes.
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Stacking is the latest in a procession of pure-joy inducing games from the bearded, indie geniuses at Double Fine Productions (its younger siblings being Psychonauts, Brütal Legend and Costume Quest).

situated in a world reminiscent of a mixture of Depression-era USA, pre-revolutionary Russia and Victorian Britain, and brought to life by means of a warm-spirited and well conceived pastiche of early cinema and fin de siècle theatre, Stacking is a microcosm/macrocosm story of familial and social struggle, populated exclusively by Russian dolls.
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Stacking XBLA may be set around the time of the great depression, but this utterly charming puzzler is anything but a downer.

Silent comedies don't get much of an outing these days, but during my childhood they were a staple of the daytime TV schedules. At some point it was decided that people didn't want to see colourless footage on their big colour screens, and that the children who watched TV in those time slots couldn't handle things being in black and white. Never mind that this was pure Philistinism and crushingly dumb respectively, that was that.
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