Stacking pigs and boxes
I'm hooked on "Styscraper," stacking pigs and barrels in a web game that's surprisingly addictive
My name is Matt and I’m addicted to stacking pigs on top of steel barrels.
Let me explain.
I’ve never been a big video game fan. When I was a kid growing up in rural Nottingham, my family was never on top of the cutting-edge: we didn’t get cable TV until years after it became passé, and any games consoles I had were hand-me-downs from family friends who’d already moved on to something several generations newer. I was still playing Sonic on my Mega Drive when everyone else got their Playstation 2s.
Web games, though, have gripped me for decades. There’s something about the magic of playing an arcade-style game in the comfort of your web browser, especially with today’s technical capabilities where fully-rendered 3D environments are served up alongside the same browser tabs that normally give you the weather forecast or that dubious chili recipe that might have given you food poisoning. Games!
Many years ago at sixth form I became obsessed with a simple helicopter game called, er, Helicopter Game. You hold down the mouse button to make the chopper go up, and let go to make it go down. I spent hours in IT A-level lessons playing this game, competing with friends for high-scores. The game, almost trivial in its pointlessness (there was no way to win, you just played until you died… like, well, life), appealed to me because of its basic yet clear imperative: just keep going.
Around the same time I discovered the beautiful games of Orisinal, including The Bottom Of The Sea, whose soothing music still calms me today. I wrote a blogpost on my “proper” blog this week about my lessons learned during redundancy, and I gave this very game, which I discovered in 2004, a shout-out for its calming abilities which I made use of before job interviews earlier this year. Sometimes these things have a knack for staying with you.
Then there’s Wordle. I’m three years in at this point, with a daily habit that feels as much a part of my morning routine as brushing my teeth or having a wee (and it usually accompanies one of these acts, let’s be real).
My daily addiction to it feels almost unpleasant at this point: after a thousand games, I take little joy in guessing the latest five-letter word. I find myself like Sisyphus, compelled daily to roll the boulder of vowels and consonants up the New York Times hill, most with success, but occasionally with real, gripping fear that I’ll get it wrong and see my win rate decline to 97%. I remember when it used to be 99%.
One day, I’ll get Wordle on the first guess, and then I think I can free myself from its tyranny.
All this brings me to Styscaper: the silly web browser game currently taking the internet by storm. Your job is to stack farm objects (and pigs) as high as you can until the tower collapses, and obtain the highest score. It’s cute, compelling, and utterly addictive.
Frequent Tetris players begin to see the grid of shapes (tetrominoes, if we’re using the proper nomenclature) in their sleep: neat patterns of rotating blocks and perfectly-fitting gaps. Well, this week I’ve been dreaming of wobbling water barrels, farting pigs and annoyingly-shaped traffic cones, all thanks to this game.
I find myself this week coming up with new strategies when I’m not playing, and desperately trying to introduce it to new players (hello) to see if I can discover some new techniques when observing their fresh gameplay. On train journeys I’m glued to my phone like the teenagers poring over TikTok, but instead watching paid-up influencers shilling cheap sweatshop fashion, I’m cautiously stacking a crate on top of an unhappy sow. I… I don’t know what’s happened to me. But you should definitely go and play this game.
Mini-feels this week
Keep your flag flying
Tuesday was the first day back at school for my son after a week of half-term, and we were inexplicably told to dress him up “as a country”. This felt like cruel and unusual punishment, like a final boss we had to defeat before we could rest and relax after 10 solid days without childcare.
I eventually sent him in dressed as “Portugal” after our less-than-awesome holiday there last winter, reasoning that the flag was fairly simple to copy:
I forgot about the crest thing, though. After kitting Ted out in red trousers and a green top (look, he’s a 90° version of Portugal, okay?), I fumbled a bit for the gold circle thing.
Eventually I gave up and printed off the crest and sellotaped it to his t-shirt, which miraculously survived the school day and was still present on his polo neck when I picked him up again later that day.
Even better? Next week is every parents’ favourite celebration: World Book Day. And we have to dress him as “his favourite word”. Pray for me.