Like Double Fine's previous Costume Quest, it is a smaller title created during the development period of Brütal Legend.

The player controls Charlie Blackmore, the smallest doll in the world, who is attempting to reunite his family that is being forced to work for an evil industrialist named The Baron.

Set in a fictional version of the industrial age, the story begins with William Blackmore, a professional chimney sweep, leaving his family to take a job under a powerful industrialist, the Baron.

A few months later, with William having failed to return and the family deep in debt, the four Blackmore children (Albert, Agatha, Abigail, and Archibald) are forced into apprenticeships by the Baron's agents, leaving the youngest, Charlie, alone with his mother Agnes.

Another letter, this time from Agatha, then leads him to the Baron's private cruise ship, the Commodore Perry, which is currently embarked on a never-ending voyage.

A third letter leads Charlie to slip aboard a massive zeppelin hosting an international summit on whether or not to ban the use of child labor, which the Baron has rigged by abducting the ambassadors opposed to him.

Charlie frees them and they manage to pass a formal ban, but the Baron subsequently orders his men to overload the zeppelin, intending to kill the delegates in a staged "accident".

In an attempt to win back the public's trust, the Baron announces plans to send all of his former child laborers on an all-expenses paid vacation using his newly-constructed private train.

Unfortunately, they are unable to stop the train before it reaches its destination, and the Baron reveals his true plan: to turn the factory into an artificial island and sell the children as a cheap labor force.

Stacking is the second game, following Costume Quest, to come from Double Fine that was initially created during an "Amnesia Fortnight" event during Brütal Legend's development period.

Tim Schafer had used the Fortnight during a time where the fate of Brütal Legend's publication was unclear, dividing the company into four teams to prototype smaller games.

[19] In particular, late in the game, players can combine the special abilities of certain dolls when stacked, a gameplay feature that would have been more interesting to explore earlier in the title.

[21] The added collection and Hi-Jinks goals were found to help with extending the game beyond the core story and provide ways of experimenting with the dolls to find solutions for the main puzzles.

[26] Donlan considered the game's world a "wonderfully crafted place" that was able to combine "the echoing grandeur of 1930s architecture and sooty technology with the home-made ingenuity of LittleBigPlanet".

[21][22] Kristine Steimer of IGN affirmed that the "witty dialogue and goofy animations amplify the fact that this game is not actually socialist propaganda".

He also added that "with a fairly competitive price point and a solid Linux release, there is very little reason not to try the game for anyone who may be so inclined to try their hand at a little Matryoshka body snatching".