Let’s dispense with the pleasantries and get right down to it. Zack and Wiki: Quest for Barbaros’ Treasure is the best puzzle game released for the Wii and possibly the best puzzle game released on any platform this year and deserves a place in the library of every Wii owner.
Another thing to get out of the way is that this game has very peculiar sensibilities and as such, may take some getting used to, especially for the more casual gaming crowd usually attracted to Wii offerings. You play as Zack, a young boy who dreams of becoming a famous pirate when he’s not standing around eating chocolate bars. For some odd reason, Zack’s faithful companion is Wiki, a golden monkey who files around using her tail as a propeller and who can transform into a golden bell, the ringing of which turns the game’s various animals into useful household items.
If that’s not strange enough for you, Zack and Wiki team up with a band of pirate rabbits, including an airplane pilot by the name of Johnny Style, in the hopes of assembling the golden skeleton of Barabos, a long lost pirate. Along the way, Zack and Wiki travel to various temples, avoiding beasties and environmental hazards while at the same time dodging the efforts of the Rose, a rival pirate, and her army of skull faced goons.
That pretty much sums up the game’s entire story in a nutshell, aside from a plot twist that anyone who has been playing games for any appreciable amount of time will see coming from a mile off, so if grand sweeping tales of epic adventure are your thing, Zack and Wiki won’t be doing it for you. What it will do for you is provide some of the most ingenious and challenging puzzles you’ve played in quite some time and in doing so, provides one of the best realizations of the Wii’s motion controls to date.
The games plays like an adventure game in that you use the Wiimote to point and click wherever you want Zack to go. If you want Zack to pick up an item, simply point to it and hit the A button—once the item is in Zack’s hand, if it’s immediately usable, the game changes perspective to show the item in Zack’s hand, as well as an oddly androgynous humanoid figure in the corner of the screen showing you how to hold the Wiimote to perform whatever action needs to be done. Actions range from moving the Wiimote as a saw to cut down trees, or tilting it as if you’re dumping out a pail of water, to swinging the controller as a tennis racket to play tennis with some fireballs. With some small exceptions, all of the motion controls work extremely well, and when issues do arise, most likely it’s because you aren’t holding the controller in the proper orientation. Once you’ve spent 10 minutes with the game, you’ll be using slither grippers and frog bombs like an old pro.
If neither of those items sounds familiar to you, it’s because you know them better as snakes and frogs, that is until you ring Wiki in their vicinity. As mentioned before, at any point, by shaking the Wiimote from side to side, Wiki will transform into a bell and be rung by Zack. Doing so around an enemy will turn them into items that can be used to manipulate the environment. Figuring out how to use the items becomes one of the main challenges in the game as sometimes the point isn’t to use the item, but simply pick it up, move it, and then turn it back into an animal so that you can use the animal to do things. Items range from totems that can be used as footstools, or weights to saws (from centipedes), bombs (from frogs) and grippers (from snakes).
To say that you’ll have a heck of a time figuring out how to use the various animals, their item counterparts and the environment in general to complete these puzzles is an understatement as these are some of the most creative and challenging puzzles around. The stages are all done in themed groups, so one theme has a number of jungle based puzzles, one has ice puzzles, some are done in a creepy haunted castle. Each theme is worked brilliantly in both the presentation of the level as well as the items available in the puzzles themselves. Sprinkled throughout the puzzles are various boss fights, such as defeating a huge dragon using nothing but your wits, Wiki and the dragon’s temperamental offspring.
