For such an innocence looking game, Toki Tori is cruelly challenging. Yes, I like playing puzzle games, but Toki Tori’s sense of challenge just goes from mild to infuriating hard. I really do like everything Toki Tori has to offer, and despite looking like an incredibly easy kiddie game it turns into one of the hardest challenging puzzle games around, and that alone is impressive. It really is a hidden gem amongst puzzle games, and one that would challenge anybody that thinks they’re clever.
The game is simple enough; Toki Tori needs to collect all the eggs in order to proceed to the next level. Toki can use a number of gadgets to get all these eggs, but usually there is a limited amount of uses on each item. These gadgets tend to range from simply building a ladder to arming an ice bazooka. The main objective is then to find a way to optimize all your items so you can collect all the eggs, and in lies the sneaky cleverness of Toki Tori. Toki Tori has a tricky twist on how you might simply try to get one egg only to not have enough resources to get the next one. More often than not, Toki Tori’s tricks you enough that it can really be trying on any player, and even with the ability to skip a level in a world it gets to the point of aggravation. Toki Tori can just spike in difficult so easily that in one moment you are getting puzzles done left and right, then in the next you don’t even know how to string two eggs together. You could spend an hour on just one puzzle and still not solve it. The game can often get stuck in your head just wondering how you can make it work, only to realize that you were completely doing the wrong approach. And all this could really just be avoid if the game gave you some clue on how to get the eggs. Whether the hint be which order to get the eggs or how to just get one of the eggs, any kind of hint system would have made such a hard puzzle game become a bit more bearable. But don’t let the games hard difficulty fool you that it has nothing else to offer, because after you solve all the regular puzzles harder puzzles are unlocked. Making Toki Tori last far longer with even more challenging puzzles then the ones in the main game. So needless to say, Toki Tori will have you scratching your head for quite some time. But for what it’s worth, it’s quite a wonderful mountain of a game to conquer, even if it looks and plays cute music while you’re doing it.
Final Thoughts:
Toki Tori is really a surprising gem of a game, and one that holds the phrase, “don’t judge a book by its cover” quite well. Although it may look cute, this game can be quite cruel with nearly each puzzle requiring all your resources of weaponry and tools, leaving little room for error, meaning this game will challenge anyone’s wit when it comes to solving puzzles.