Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure

Eject!

For example, the very beginning of the game puts you in an aircraft. You can move around by basically pointing on which part you want to walk to and clicking like any normal adventure. If you want to interact with an object, your pointer icon turns pink to indicate it's something you can use or look at, and you quickly find your way out by simply pulling a lever to open an escape hatch.

Soon afterwards you'll be falling to your doom, with disaster averted by finding and opening an umbrella to enable you to parachute safely down. Each of these small actions in the game requires a degree of real-life mimicry with the Wii remote, so you might utilise Wiki's bell by 'ringing' the remote. This, in turn, petrifies a creature which can be used as a makeshift saw that you need in order to chop a tree down that's blocking your path; as you might expect, making a little sawing action does the trick, and then you can continue on your way. As basic as this all sounds, it's an example of the logical train of thought it requires from you - but don't worry, because it soon ramps up to providing more engaging, ambitious and involving puzzling.

The first one we played which gave a true indication of what the game's trying to do was set in the confines of an icy temple. With a locked door barring progress, the plan, it seemed, was to build an ice key by manipulating a contraption which poured water out on one side, and froze the water on another side. So, with much trial and error, the realisation dawned on not only how to make a basic key, but how to melt the frozen one so it spilled into the shape you require. With all the clues and tools packed into a single location, eventually everything fell into place and allowed us to make a correctly shaped key and access the treasure chest in the next room - but not before twisting the key around the right way and inserting it as you might expect.

Fishing for clues

Another location required a similar degree of common sense and lateral thought. You're trying to gain access to a locked door, as per usual, but to get there involves catching a gigantic fish and meddling with the water levels so you can swim into the correct sequence of tunnels. Needless to say, finding the right bait, hooking it on, casting the line and hauling the fish out requires the sort of interactive approach we've seen in other Wii titles, but in a context that doesn't just spoon-feed you the solution.

Practically everything you do in Zak & Wiki requires you to take the time to figure things out on your own, but nothing we came across felt stupidly illogical or obscure. With a little patience, some audience participation and some experimentation things slowly come together. And if that doesn't help, then you can spend a few coins and get the game's Oracle to help you out and point you in the right direction. With built-in hints helping to eliminate the inevitable frustration factor, it's a game that should build up a broad appeal - potentially helping to introduce a whole new audience to adventure-style games.

Interestingly, although the cute cartoon visuals are among the most attractive seen on the Wii, there's a a very deliberate old-school Nintendo vibe about the design ethos, with text-based interactions and gurgly noises between characters rather than voice-overs. The humour and character style has a very early-'90s Japanese sensibility to it: childish, but with its tongue firmly wedged in its cheek. It's a game that you might not initially think you'd warm to, but there's a twinkle in its eye that's hard to resist once it gets going.

What we've seen so far admittedly only scratches the surface of what the game has to offer, but the 90 minutes we played and watched it left us in no doubt that Capcom knows what it's doing. Reminiscent of the quirky spirit of adventure it infused into titles like Gregory Horror Show and Phoenix Wright, yet again it looks to be taking the genre into unexpected places. And with the Wii looking capable of becoming the most successful console of this generation, could we be about witness the first mainstream adventure success for a decade? Check back soon for our full review in the run-up to the game's release later this year.