In the corner of my room is an Xbox Series X, and I’m just sitting here playing Zack & Wiki like a dunce. It’s my birthday soon. I have been consistently missing new console drops for the last month, but found a nice man up the road who didn’t want his. Not a scalper. Just a friendly middle-aged guy, who didn’t have time to play it due to having children and a newfound interest in astral photography. He even threw in a fan attachment and a couple of games. I haven’t opened it yet because buying it coincided with my wife’s birthday, so we spent the weekend celebrating that. Also, I really wanted to finish Zack & Wiki, a 15-year-old Wii game.

Zack & Wiki is kind of great. It is an adventure game stripped back to its bare essentials. The story is lightweight, but charming. Zack is a kid who aspires to be a legendary pirate. Him and his flying magical monkey friend Wiki hang out with a pirate gang called the Sea Rabbits (the other members are rabbits). There is a rival gang of goons that serve the formidable Captain Rose - a young woman who is always upset that you keep nabbing the treasure she wanted. That changes when you discover the animated skull of Captain Barbaros, who offers to give you his pirate ship in exchange for finding the rest of his body parts. Can you find his golden limbs before Captain Rose? Is Barbaros as friendly as he seems? Who cares?! Just find some treasure, you dummy.

The game is broken down into contained stages that resemble dioramas, like Captain Toad without the rotation. The puzzles are much like classic point-and-click adventure games. A lot of picking up items and using them in the correct order and location.

The most notable mechanic is the ability to shake Wiki, who turns into a bell. This allows you to suck up coins, but more importantly it can transform animals into useful objects. Bats become umbrellas, centipedes become saws, moles become drills, etc. The first three quarters of this game is incredibly clever and balanced, with a gentle difficulty curve. This is helpful since Zack dies from a single hit, and doing things in the wrong order will often require a restart.

You control Zack with the IR pointer, the one aspect of the wiimote that consistently works. Unfortunately, most interactions require motion controls. Some of these are simple: turning a key or pulling a lever. Others are so thoroughly broken or poorly explained. There’s a shitty fishing puzzle, a rhythm minigame, and they decide to introduce sword fighting in the final level! Oh, and you have to simulate a lasso in the final boss fight. It all sucks.

The game stopped being fun for me towards the end. The levels got too convoluted, requiring you perform too many actions in the correct order or have to start over. In the final level I just said fuck it and used a guide. I might have been more patient if that Xbox was not sitting on the floor next to me, staring at me lovingly.

I can’t emphasise enough how much I enjoyed most of this game. Some of those early puzzles are so much fun to prod at to find the solutions, and the visuals are bright and colourful. I can see myself coming back to this game again and again. However, it will probably join the pantheon of games I love to replay, but only to a certain point. It’s in good company. There’s Halo, up until just after the Flood show up, or GoldenEye until I realise the next level is Statue.

Anyway, screw this Wii nonsense. Masterchief and I have some catching up to do.