Game Review: Stacking: The Lost Hobo King

Up to about two hours in length, The Lost Hobo King is a fine add-on to Stacking. It's just as polished, quirky, and ragtime as the original. The price (400 MS points) is reasonable, but only so, in my opinion, for the patron who is confident he or she will enjoy the DLC. And you will like it if you liked Stacking. But I think I like The Lost Hobo King as an idea, a trend, more than I like the game itself.

It abounds with extras like Hi-Jinks, mini-objectives that involve using a character's ability in a certain context a certain number of times. For example, once you find the matryoshka doll whose ability is to put buckets on others' heads, you simply do that to a set number of NPCs. Then, ta-da, one Hi-Jinks objective complete; a few percentage points toward 100% completion of the DLC. The quest consists of three main puzzles (each with multiple possible solutions) before the climactic one. There is a cast of special characters like a farmer with a corncob pipe (with smoke) for a hat, a night-vision raccoon, and a Monty Python-inspired galloping knight. I mention all this because in large part the value of this game, like Stacking, exists in the extras. Players willing to wring out content by going back to an already completed puzzle and seeing the other solutions, finding special characters, and completing incidental goals, will be satisfied. Completing the story as quickly as possible, you will see about a third of the content.

I was happy to hear some music from Stacking, along with some new tracks. The tunes aren't groundbreaking, but hearing ragtime piano and silent film scores in a game is rare enough that it feels fresh.

But how do I like The Lost Hobo King, ultimately? The answer is: I like it enough. Its brevity is certainly one of its strengths. In other words, it doesn't hackney itself. Uniqueness is one of TLHK's other strong points. What I like best about it, and the game to which it attaches is this: I believe that a trend away from violence as the go-to gameplay mechanic would be a good one. Not that it would be successful. But I'm more automatically interested in games that play differently. And The Lost Hobo King is different. The original is worth your money if you feel about games how I do. The expansion? Only if you enjoyed the first intrinsically rather than as an idea.