Do you remember those old point and click puzzle games on the PC? Those 2D games that were great and kept you thinking for ages? They had a way of making you so annoyed at yourself for not being able to figure out how to get past a gun touting clown or the mean goat that kept attacking you, cursing the game to burn in the fiery pits of Hades because you had a faulty copy that couldn’t be completed and it wasn’t your fault. But then you finally figured it out and felt like you were a gaming god for passing the test set to challenge you to your limits, you realize this game is the best one ever created and you adore it so.

Capcom now lovingly gives you that feeling all over again with Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros’ Treasure on the Wii; a point and click game that runs with the same traditions as its PC grandparents but can this type of gameplay work on Nintendo’s light white box of wonder? And have we finally got an A+ game the hardcore gamers have been dying for?

Zack & Wiki is the story of a wannabe pirate (Zack) and his rather odd flying yellow monkey sidekick (Wiki) who are the newest member of a band of sky pirates trying to make a name for themselves when they are attacked by another band of sky pirates (happens to me all the time). Having to bail out of their plane, they land in a jungle to find a huge golden treasure chest containing the head of the legendary pirate Barbaros, which for some reason can float and talk. Proclaiming that if the twosome return the other pieces of his body to complete him again, he will give his old ship to them to do as they please, and so they begin the quest to find the other missing parts of his body.

So that’s the story, there are 15+ pieces of his body to find, all made from shiny gold pieces of treasure, which I think is actually a pretty cool idea. The game marks out areas on a map which the player can choose and warp to, which means no travelling from place to place aimlessly in this game at all, no doubt some people will hate this fact while others will rejoice. Personally I really like not having to walk everywhere, not because I’m virtually lazy but because it means the game can focus more on puzzles. Regardless of traveling, each area has one treasure chest containing a piece of Barbaros missing body with something blocking your path, your job is to get to it.

One of the best parts of Zack & Wiki is its fiendish puzzles, where you start off with easier less taxing puzzles with a good dose of help. Things soon change and the puzzles slowly pushes you further and further while helping you less and less, making in my opinion a fantastic learning curve while still being challenging enough for you to feel proud to have solved it.

There are points however when a level can really test your patience. One thing that every player must learn is not everything you can do in the game is correct, but the game will let you go ahead and do it anyway, usually leading to your demise. When playing you will die a lot, and seeing as there aren’t checkpoints during levels this can be extremely frustrating when you’ve spent an hour getting past that guardian robot only to die 10 seconds later to a lava pool. Luckily you can use ‘dolls’ to call a ‘fairy’ (which is a rabbit in a costume and brings a little bit of comedy into it) to bring you back to life instantly rather than having to start the puzzle from the beginning again, but at the cost of your level score.

After mentioning the level score, I think it’s a good idea if I explain it. As I said before, not everything you can do in Zack & Wiki is the right thing to do, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it as the game will still reward you for trying to think outside the box in the way of points. Each time you do something clever you get points, each time you complete a puzzle you get points, but depending on how long and how many times you try finalizes how many points you get. At the end of the level all your points are totalled up and you are given a rank which just adds to huge ego (that is if you can complete each puzzle).

The game will take around 15 hours or so to complete for the experienced gamer, possibly less if your brain is some sort of machine. While this doesn’t sound like a lot of time, remember there is no travelling in the game so that’s 15 hours of straight puzzling and that will seem like a long while when you try and take on some of the later puzzles

Graphically the game is very stylized, but in that good way that many games try to do and very few of them actually succeed ay doing, and although it looks very childish in its own way, it doesn’t play that way at all and this is definitely hard to pinpoint who Capcom where aiming this game at but I think it probably leans more towards the older puzzle solving audience. As expected from a Capcom game everything is crisp and runs smooth without lag.

Along with the graphics are quite childish sound clips, which I don’t think will bother the older or more hardcore gamer. Sound in the game has definitely kept his eastern feeling with snippets of voice acting in the game having a very Japanese pronunciation (‘Wiki’ sounds more like ‘weekly’), but I just think this adds to the overall character of the game.

Most important in the game are controls, while older point and click adventures just used the mouse, Zack & Wiki uses just the Wii-mote. Capcom have really gone to great efforts to make as many elements as possible in the game to have motion controls and this doesn’t feel cheap or tacked on either, some of these puzzles just wouldn’t work as well without them. An example is the first puzzle you are given, while falling through the air you grab a umbrella to use like parachute (someone watched Mary Poppins) it tells you to examine the umbrella (which has a big 2 button on the handle), then hold the Wii-mote straight up with a example image on screen and when you figure out to press the 2 button on the Wii-mote the umbrella opens up. It’s simple, clever and works well without feeling pointless. I won’t lie that these controls could easily be mapped to a controller, but doesn’t that take some of the fun out of it?

Closing Comments
While Z&W is represented as a kid’s game, the puzzles will drive people of any age crazy and then chuffed after figuring out to turn the one into a straw and then… well I’m not going to spoil that one for you.

Zack & Wiki is an extra ordinary 3rd party game and I think other 3rd parties should take note, this is how to make an interesting, innovative and enjoyable Wii game. If you want my opinion it’s no puzzle why it’s selling well in Europe.

Score 8.7

+ Great puzzles
+ Great sense of humour
+ Some imaginative use of the Wiimote

- Story is weak
- Could be frustrating for some
- Wish it was a little longer