You are a bird, of sorts. A little yellow, bridge building, stone throwing, freeze ray shooting, slug sucking, ghost trapping, flightless, bird. Toki Tori, a puzzle game created by developer Two Tribes, features four unique worlds consisting of twelve stages and multiple difficulty levels. It’s currently available on the PC through Valve’s Steam, WiiWare, and the iPhone, and it will set you back $4.99. As an important note to the readers, I played the PC version using an Xbox 360 control.

Gameplay

Toki Tori is a puzzle game start to finish. It ranges in difficulty from simple to quite difficult, but in an effort to alleviate the frustration that can build through the course of the game, you are granted one free pass to skip a stage and continue progressing.

The stages themselves utilize various sets of obstacles like; gaps, drops, spikes, attack slugs, lava, and even a ghost or two. These obstacles are overcome by using an array of various tools that can do things such as build bridges, freeze adversaries into ice cubes, or set traps.  To further complicate things the use of these tools is limited by a unit count, usually there are just enough units total to solve a puzzle in one or two ways.

The game does a nice job of introducing the tools to you gradually over the course of the game. It will typically give you a paragraph or so of description and then have a level immediately following that is designed specifically to teach you the tools mechanic.

My only complaints regarding gameplay were centered around two of the items. To be honest they are pretty minor, but given some of the inherent complexity of certain levels they can very quickly become the scapegoat for a considerable amount of built up frustration.

The first of which is the Slug Sucker. This item is used, much like its name implies, to suck up slugs. When the device is introduced it mentions that the device can be used in such a way that it redirects slugs at no expense to your unit count but this specific function seems more or less abandoned and forgotten about until late in the world. To be fair, it really feels like the mechanic in question was more of a design consequence rather than an intended function to which they designed a whole level around.

My second gameplay complaint involves the Bubble Suit. This item allows you to freely float in the underwater stages of the game. The suit itself works fine and isn’t all that bad. My issue is mainly concerning its charge system, it receives a certain amount of charges, these charges were then expended by moving a certain number of spaces. The problem was it was very easy to make a false step which sometimes resulted in a complete fail.

Audio Visual

Looks good, sounds good. The game resides in 2D but uses 3D graphics with bright and bold primary colors that give a cheerful feeling to even the slime covered stages. The animations are all polished and Toki Tori is pretty adorable while you are idle thinking about that next move of yours.  As far as the user interface goes it is polished and clean, all the information you need regarding available tools and their quantities is presented in an easy to glance at way.

Audio for Toki Tori could have been a disaster. If a crappy song had been looping the whole time you were on some levels it could have made you hate life. Fortunately that is not the case and your life can remain unhated because the music is quite pleasant and suits the character of each world adding nicely to their respectively unique atmospheres.

Sample Audio Tracks:

• Toki_Tori-Creepy_Castle
• Toki_Tori-Forest_Falls

A Brief Side Complaint

I have to admit guys, I got stumped. I got really freaking stumped. I ended up having to tune in to some YouTube video’s on a couple of stages and what I saw was disheartening. For the first time in my adult life I felt old, real old. There they were, two prepubescent lads giving me the secret sauce to Toki Tori, cracking voices and all. The worst part was what they then went on to show me was so blatantly obvious that I had begun to wonder if my brain was becoming completely incapable of non-linear thought processes. Time makes fools of us all, I suppose.

Summary

Toki Tori is $4.99 and is available on WiiWare, PC, and iPhone. The game is challenging and offers a good deal of first play through playtime and solid replay value. There are frequent moments of frustration do to game difficulty, but that is kind of the point of the genre. To puzzle game lovers it’s an easy game to recommend, so I do. To those who aren’t necessarily fans of the genre but are looking for a good value it may be something you should look into.