Double Fine is a good developer, right? Psychonauts was definitely a great game, and Brutal Legends was fun to play, funny and original. Sure, Costume Quest was terrible, but 2 out of 3 is a great track record.

Now they come at us with a game that has a title befitting of the Atari era (by that I mean a single-word title that just says what you’ll be doing in the game), not about really wacky ideas and worlds like they usually do, but a more subdued story of a tiny russian nesting doll going to save his family from slavery brought upon them by an evil Baron, with STACKING powers!

Read on and see if Double Fine have another gem in their hands, or if it’s just a turd like Costume Quest.

Developer: Double Fine Productions
Publisher: THQ
Date of Release: February 8th 2011
Platforms: Playstation 3 (PSN)

Genre: Puzzle
Rated E for everyone

What’s good in the game

Gameplay concept
The gameplay concept here is nearly genius. Using the tiniest russian nesting doll (matryoshka) in the world, you have a strange power: you can get inside any other matryoshka that is one size bigger than your doll, and you can stack multiple dolls that way. Each doll other than the base tiny doll has a special skill. It might be blowing smoke, farting, shooting water, fixing stuff, flying and various other things. Each area has a few puzzle segments, where you have to either escape from somewhere or defeat an opponent or just get to the following area, and you have a certain obstacle blocking you. There’s 2 types of dolls: normal and unique dolls. Normal dolls appear multiple times within the levels, and, other than the ones that enable you to detect unique dolls, they’re rarely useful. Unique dolls, on the other hand, have powers different from any normal doll within that level, and are usually what you need to use to find solutions to the puzzles presented to you. The solutions for each puzzle can actually get pretty creative.

Replay Value
Each puzzle in the game has multiple solutions. You can just find one solution to each puzzle and move on, but the funnest part of the game, to me at least, was going back to an older puzzle and finding more solutions to them, that really requires getting creative. Usually you’ll probably find the easiest solutions, but other solutions are just a bit tougher to figure out. There’s more things to find, like Hi-jinks which require using certain powers on certain dolls, and of course finding all the unique dolls (and stacking certain sets of unique dolls as well), some which require a bit of puzzle-solving to get themselves.

The main game lasts not much more than 4 hours long (if that), but the replay value here  can make it last quite a bit longer.

What’s average about the game

Presentation
The game looks very pretty. It takes a realistic style to display the dolls on screen, they look quite genuine. Their animations are very simple, with their walking being no more complicated that wobbling around, and their emotions are only displayed in a very simplistic manner, with more rageful wobbling around, or emoticons. While the style is simple and fairly lively (despite the overuse of brown), technically it’s made clear that it’s a downloadable game. While the dolls look great, the environments are filled with jaggies on anything sort of round-ish and the textures aren’t that high-res. Still, the presentation good, everything is fairly nicely detailed and whatever can be useful in the environment is rarely hard to find (though only a few puzzles use the environment at all).

The best part of the presentation, to me at least, were the cinematics made in the style of silent cinema, with text appearing on screen after a character talks, with the old silent movie-style piano music. While the cinematics themselves weren’t that interesting to watch since the story is subpar (unlikely hero kid goes to save his family, and it doesn’t go far beyond that), I still enjoyed their style and the music, and that was enough to get me through them.

Difficulty
I actually have a bit of a problem with the game’s difficulty. It’s WAY too easy. The game basically tells you at least one of the solutions for each puzzle (sometimes outright, other times it’s so heavily hinted it’s impossible not to figure out), making it impossible not to get to the end. If that’s somehow not enough, the game has a hint system, which can let you reveal new hints if enough time passes by. Sure, it’s optional, but it still makes it needlessly easy. And talking to the dolls required to help you through a puzzle will usually tell you what they can do to help, or at least hint at it.

If you don’t use the hint system, most puzzles will require a good amount of creativity, but there’s generally a lot of hints for puzzle solutions anyways (even without the hint system), making finding them all relatively easy. It’s not too easy to the point of, say, Enslaved, where the game plays itself, but it could have posed a bigger challenge without being unreasonably hard.

Gameplay execution
While the gameplay concept is great, the way it was executed is a bit weak. The gameplay is super slow, the movement controls are slightly delayed and awkward, and the difficulty, as mentioned earlier, makes the gameplay feel weaker than it could have been. It’s not exactly a huge problem, and might not bother most people (I mean, tons of people can stand the terrible movement controls of GTAIV and RDR, so the movement here shouldn’t bother them at all), but to me it felt like the game couldn’t reach its full potential. Harder puzzles and more exciting gameplay would have done it great good.

Overall

I won’t say it’s a bad game. Heck, this is the first game in a while without a “what sucks about this game” segment to its review. You have a very strong and unique gameplay concept, good replay value and a fairly nice presentation, so it’s definitely worth checking out. On the other hand, it only has an average story, it’s really easy even when trying to find all the puzzle solutions, it’s really short, and it feels a bit weak in its gameplay execution, but, even with those problems, I still think it’s a fun game to play.

While I wasn’t fully impressed with the game, I’m sure a lot of people will end up enjoying it a lot more than I did. It didn’t exactly click with me, but it might click with you. Double Fine doesn’t have a third gem in their hands, but to say it’s a bad game would be wrong.

Pros and Cons

Pros
- Great gameplay concept
- Looks nice, if not a bit on the weak side technically
- A good amount of replay value

Cons
- Short
- Not as good as it could be considering the great gameplay concept
- Too easy

The Save Factor

15$ for this new? That’s a bit too high considering how short it is. 10$ would be a much better price. But, as of the time of writing of this review, the game is free if you have a PSN+, so if you’re subscribed to that/have a friend with PSN+, definitely check it out.

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