Mr. Stackman

Genre: Puzzle-Platformer / Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

Mr. Stackman is an Arcade-style Puzzle-Platformer released in 2026 on Nintendo Switch. In this game, players control a character pushing boxes around a screen as they’re dropped in by conveyors, trying to last as long as possible while clearing complete rows Tetris-style. Let three boxes fall on your head, or let any stack of box reach the top of the screen and you lose.

The presentation here makes the game appear as if it is being played on an old-school Nokia-style phone, though it doesn’t really commit to that aesthetic, with its two-tone 2D visuals moving too smoothly for that sort of screen and not being pixel art-based, and with the game’s decent synthesized music not really fitting the sort of sound you got from Nokia phones. This leads me to thinking that the stylized presentation was a purely cynical choice to try to excuse the terrible animation and stiff gameplay.

On the note of that gameplay, players can’t really do much here. You can move left or right, pushing any single block you encounter, and you can jump one block high and move left or right one space, pushing any single block you encounter. That’s it. you can’t push any block if it’s not at the top of its stack, nor can you push multiple blocks.

Your limited jump height and distance means that it is extremely easy to get trapped in this game – once a stack of blocks reaches a height of 3 above the adjacent block, everything to its left becomes locked off to you. Be unfortunate enough to get buried in a well that’s 2 or more blocks deep, and you’ll be stuck in there until a block gets dropped on your head, mercifully killing one of your three lives.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, your movement and falling speeds are frustratingly slow, lacking the snappiness of the old Game and Watch games that were similarly tile-based. You would hope that being so limited in your movement you could at least compensate by speeding back and forth on the screen to try to push boxes where they won’t trap you, but you’re so sluggish that trying to reach a distant block to move it before it becomes an impassable tower often seems like a crapshoot.

Because of the game’s limited movement and frustratingly slow speed, along with the randomness of where boxes are dropped, winning and losing in Mr. Stackman seems purely down to dumb luck, and as a result when you do lose it doesn’t feel like you made a mistake so much as that’s just how the game’s luck worked out. And even when you’re winning, the game is too tedious to be fun. If you’re looking for a retro-style Puzzle-Platformer with Arcade sensibilities, I recommend you look elsewhere.

tl;dr – Mr. Stackman is an Arcade-style Puzzle-Platformer that has you moving a character around pushing boxes to try to clear them out Tetris-style while avoiding them falling on your head. Unfortunately, your move set is so restrictive and your movement so sluggish that winning and losing seems down to pure luck, and playing this game is tedious and frustrating. Don’t bother with this.

Grade: C-

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