Secret Files: Tunguska Wii Review
Many of us remember the hey-day of the point-and-click adventure with great fondness. Classic games like Monkey Island, Sam and Max, Full Throttle and Day of the Tentacle made a huge impression on many gamers, but until recently the genre had all but disappeared.
Luckily for their fans, point-and-click adventures are making something of a come back at the moment, and the Wii seems the ideal platform for them. Nintendo gamers have taken to the genre with gusto, with games like Capcom’s hilarious Zack & Wiki and now even those wacky mascots of the point-and-click era Sam & Max are coming to Wii. You don’t need a graphical power house to create a great looking adventure in this genre, and the advantages of Wii remote are pretty obvious.
Secret Files : Tunguska, an adventure story originally released on the PC in 2006 by developers Animation Arts and Fusionsphere System, is the latest in this new Wii wave of point and click games.
The majority of current point-and-click games are comedy based, so we were curious to see how the more serious Secret Files: Tunguska would pan out. Can a modern point-and-click engage its audience without comedy?
Like many adventure games before it Secret Files: Tunguska (Can we please just call this one SF:T from here on out?-Ed) uses an actual historical incident as the basis of it’s story. And it’s a tale that quite literally starts with a bang. On the 30th of June 1908 in Tunguska, a remote region in central Siberia, a massive inexplicable explosion took place. Nothing at the time that could have accounted for a blast of this scale, which tore into the Russia wilderness with the destructive power of 2,000 Hiroshima bombs , felling more than 6,000 square metres of pine forest. Perhaps even more spookily, just before the explosion, witnesses saw an oblong object glowing in a blueish-white light, fall from the sky. Right up to this day it is still not clear what really triggered the Tunguska catastrophe. (Cue all manner of crazy conspiracy theories –Ed)
This mystery forms the basis for the story in Secret Files of Tunguska, which sees you playing as Nina, the daughter of Professor Kalenkov, a museum curator who is kidnapped at the beginning of the game. His disappearance sets Nina off on a search for her father that reveals the reason for the Tunguska explosion and a conspiracy of world shattering proportions. (Told you so!-Ed) You’ll follow the clues round the world in search of daddy dearest, solving puzzles and interacting with various characters.
We’ve missed the fun of exploring a good graphic adventure, and initially got quite a bit of satisfaction from cracking puzzles in Secret Files: Tunguska and being rewarded as the story moved on. But this, it turns out is very much a game for fans of the genre, who enjoy this sort of thing. Newer players might not find enough here to maintain long term interest. The puzzles are fairly average and very often solving them was just a case of grabbing everything we could find in an area and trying it out on, well, everything else. You might say that’s par for the course, but unless you’re a fairly dedicated the point and click fan all that too-ing and fro-ing with Nina, coupled with the slow pace of the plot can become a bit of a grind. On the up side, the introduction of a second playable character later in the adventure very much helps bring some variety to proceedings and the game is quite easy, so you rarely encounter the kind of frustrating blocks that prevent you progressing that are common in games like this.
Secret Files also scores points with its control system and while it’s true that point-and-click adventures have never really been at home on console joypads, you won’t be overly frustrated with control on the Wiimote. You use it to move the Wiimote shaped pointer around the screen like a mouse, and clicking the B and A buttons to examine or interact with items respectively. There’s even a nifty magnifying glass you can tap to highlight all the ‘clickable’ objects in the environment, which is a great time saver. The oversized pointer can occasionally make it difficult to select the right objects on screen, but over all that and the ever crucial inventory system work quite well.
What wasn’t quite as enjoyable as we moved through the game was the often terrible dialogue and voice work. There’s some of the dodgiest voice work we’ve heard in a while here. Particularly disconcerting is the work of the actress who plays lead character Nina. She must surely have attended the Keanu Reeves School of ‘one emotion acting’, as no matter what’s happening to her, her chirpy American upbeat voice is pretty much the same. Whether she’s flirting with her sidekick/love interest, escaping imminent death or lamenting her father’s disappearance doesn’t seem to matter. The other voice work in the game is also a bit of a mixed bag. Accents are all over the place and often lines are delivered with atrocious timing and all the emotion of, well, a person reading a script they clearly don’t understand. To be fair, with some of the dialogue they’ve been given you can understand why. People generally don’t tend to deliver reams of exposition in real life the way they have to in these kinds of games! It’s funny at times, but not quite the funny Secret Files needs.
Secret Files: Tunguska isn’t a bad game, but it’s stuck in something of a catch twenty two situation- it’s too simplistic to really satisfy old school point-and–click gamers, but not exciting enough to capture casual players. Playing it we could see why the majority of current console point and click games are going for a comedy theme. The point and click mechanic, unless done exceptionally well with a great story, isn’t deep enough to hold modern gamers without the distraction that humour brings. When you’re watching for the next wacky thing that’s about to happen, you’re not getting bored by a lull in the story. (And laughter will make me forgive anything-Ed)
The fact that there aren’t many games like this out on the Wii is a point in Secret Files favour, but it just doesn’t seem likely to garner too many new converts to the genre. There isn’t enough excitement in Secret Files: Tunguska to prevent less patient gamers from enjoying it but not pushing through to its conclusion.
That said Secret Files: Tunguska with its decent control system and interesting, if slow paced story, is still a worthwhile purchase if you like these kinds of games and don’t mind an easy one.
UKMusic.com rating: 3 out of 5
Secret Files: Tunguska is out now on Nintendo Wii
Written by Sam Bandah
