Zack and Wiki Review

Zack and Wiki is a game that completely confounds expectations. A point and click adventure game on the Wii, with kid-tacular graphics and a family-friendly pirate theme? Snoooore. Sounds like yet another cruddy budget game for the Wii, doesn’t it? Ever since Nintendo’s standards for what games could appear on its system loosened (hello, Escape from Bug Island), gamers have been subjected to awful second-rate games that should not have been released.

Zack and Wiki: Quest for Barbados’ Treasure is not one of those games.

A bit of background: the PC market, way back when, used to be comprised wholly of these neat, puzzle-solving adventure games. Players of these games were appalled when games such as Wolfenstein 3D broke the hard mold of the adventure games, but the new style of games quickly overran those old, now-boring adventure games, and they fell out of favor. Zack and Wiki is a reinvention of those types of games, and it does its job very well.

You play as Zack, a young pirate with big dreams (and big eyes), along with his golden monkey totem friend, Wiki. Early on, he finds the still-talking, and floating, skull of the legendary Barbados. If Zack goes on a quest to find the rest of the pieces of Barbados’ very shiny skeletal body, he’ll be awarded with his treasure and the legendary ship that Barbados sailed.

Most levels consist of only a single, though sometimes rather large, screen, riddled with many little puzzles, or in the case of smaller levels, one more complicated puzzle. The difficulty of the puzzles can be intense sometimes, and while the graphics appear to be geared towards little kids, the game’s puzzles most certainly are not! Some, such as one in which the player must use a device that both pours water and freezes it in order to create a color-coded crystalline key aren’t the tough, but others – especially later ones – will confound the most dedicated of thinkers. Even the game’s first ‘boss’ stage throws the player for a loop, ramping up the difficulty quickly.

And it’s far more than merely puzzle solving through clicking with the Wii-mote. Every object has to be used in a certain way with the motion-sensing controller, from simple things such as a sawing motion to cut through wood with a saw, to cranking the Wiimote to operate a winch. Flipping the controller end over end will make Zack hold some objects – like an umbrella – in the opposite direction.

If Capcom had decided to make the puzzle-solving that in-depth right there, I would have been a satisfied puzzle-solving player. But there is one more layer of puzzle here. Wiki, the golden flying monkey that follows Zack everywhere (and mocks his impending doom at every turn) is used to interact with the environment as well, specifically the creatures that Zack encounters. Shaking the Wiimote makes the little primate transform into a bell and ring loudly, so that enemies that Zack is adjacent to (and can hear the bell) transform into items that are used to solve puzzles. The items can also be transformed back into enemies, a feature used to solve puzzles as well.

But it’s not all rainbows and happiness with this game. Occasionally, Zack will find little skulls sitting in the levels. Ringing Wiki near these causes Barbados’ orchestra director to appear and engage Zack in a difficult minigame of rhythm. Except it isn’t simple button pressing rhythm, but rather attempting to shake the Wiimote in time to a very sketchy series of bell-icons. This is not well-explained the first time you find the musical skeleton, but my main gripe is how terrible the sound is compared to the rest of the game. Somebody walked by me in the office and said, “it sounds like you’re playing on a Playskool toy out here.” That’s pretty bad, folks. Oh yes, it’s fun, but so very awkward at the same time. Fortunately, this does not at all ruin the game, and just provides a bit of a diversion for some extra, but ultimately not-entirely necessary treasure.

In short, Zack and Wiki made me love these adventuring, puzzle-solving games all over again. Here’s hoping for a sequel and even more innovation.