Simple is a loaded word. A knife is simple, just a blade sticking out of a handle, but there are more kinds in the world than can reasonably be counted, not to mention techniques to best use them. Wheels are simple, just a flat circle designed to spin smoothly, but cars, bikes, and skateboards all use different types and have a huge variety available. Stacking things on top of things is not the most complicated idea ever, but physics is a beast and when the goal is to build the tallest pile of stuff possible what had looked like a very simple task gets surprisingly tricky, very quickly. Stack Masters is a game whose entire concept is right in its name, where you’ve got a variety of geometric shapes and a goal to see just how high they can go.
Boxes are easy to stack, just dump one on top of the other while rotating to make sure the long side is vertical and the job is complete, but boxes with nice ninety-degree corners get scarce fairly quickly. Triangles, weirdly shaped rhombuses, not-quite-parellelograms, and other less-regular shapes populate the levels fairly quickly, but the goal is always to not just build a tower that touches the end-zone but also one that won’t fall over for a five-count. Once you’ve got a tower that reaches the goal you can hover over the zone to see how it fares against everyone else who’s played, instantly discovering that there have to be more techniques available than are immediately obvious. The walls of the level, for example, can be used to brace a shaky tower, and so long as that top piece touches the goal even a little its entire height is taken into account for the score. Meanwhile new stages bring new tricks to construction, such as pieces that can’t be manually rotated and instead pivot depending on where you pick them up, or stripey-zones in the level where you can’t hold on to the pieces at all and instead have to toss or drop them into place. “Build a tower with these pieces” is a very simple concept, but Stack Masters keeps playing with it in near-endless ways over a huge number of levels that keep ramping up the trickiness. Even so, there’s a zen-like state you can fall into carefully arranging everything just right, and then tearing it all down when a new idea wanders on by.
Stack Masters released today on Steam and it’s a great little puzzle game with a ton of content and variety behind its simple concept. The trailer comes with a hefty developer commentary after it, so if you want to know more there’s a lot to learn. Alternately it’s a whopping$3.99 on Steamminus the launch discount, so it might just be worth piling things up and seeing where the stack takes you.
