I do not know whether it was the IGN reviews or testimony from gamers online that led me to purchase this game initially, but I acquired it nonetheless. Now that I have completed the game in its entirety, I am sceptical that there was any positive testimony at all regarding this game.

I possess no aversion to the genre of point-and-click adventure games, and I am typically enthusiastic about any well-made offering by a first-class company like Capcom.

But Zack and Wiki is a true disappointment.

Zack and Wiki is a game that attempts to do something innovative with the controller. While I am aware that the game is older than most on the Wii (since it came out closer to the system’s launch), I am still really disappointed by both the simplicity and unreliability of their motion controllers.

Since it is a point-and-click adventure game, Zack and Wiki revolves around the tried and true mechanic of finding items and using them on anything in sight until it works. However, the game designers took it one step further, by introducing gesture based usage of items. To use a saw, you saw. To wind a crank, you crank. To pull a switch, you pull a switch. It is a nifty idea, and makes the experience feel very tactile.

Of course, that would only be completely true if the gestures worked half the time. More often than not, the item will flail inexplicably or require some sort of obscure precise movement that is nothing like using the item on screen.

Another one of my biggest complaints about the game is the unrelenting punishment for failure. As I mentioned above, games of this type are typically about experimenting with items in different ways to find a solution to a problem. I’ve played through the entire Myst series, and a whole slew of classic adventure games that openly encourage experimentation. Sometimes you can combine items into an essentially useless combination. Sometimes your experimentation will be laughed at by a narrator or NPC. But you are never so fiercely punished as you are in Zack and Wiki.

In fact, I would describe Zack and Wiki as the anti-adventure game. Going even further, Zack and Wiki is an anti-game. There is no experimentation. There is no creativity. The game operates on such a rigidly defined path set out by the game developers that the walkthrough is a simple list of bullet points. Events must be done in the order that was decided upon during development, otherwise the player is penalized or killed.

The threat of this is terrifying, as the game offers no intermediate save points in a level. You have three choices: 1. do the level flawlessly on your first try 2. operate through trial-and-error while using up vast amount of “resurrection tokens”, which substantially reduce your score 3. experiment (as the Gods of Gaming intended) and be forced to restart the level from the beginning every time you deviate from The Plan.

It is a grim future.

I’ve spoken negatively of this game before, but now that I have completed it and seen the ending, I can honestly say that this game has no redeeming qualities. Poorly designed and unrewarding gameplay, virtually zero actual mental challenge (since your creative solution will never be correct), deplorable storyline and one-dimensional characters. Even the dialogue is awful, and it seems to suffer from translation issues (or it was written that way to give the appearance of a kitschy translation issue).

If you have a Wii, and you’re looking for a game to buy for cheap, stay away from this one. Even with a low price tag, it isn’t worth it. Try hooking your nipples up to a car battery. It will be more thrilling.