The original Toki Tori was an excruciating relic of the post-Chip's Challenge era, clunkily requiring extreme precision in a real-time game where enemies roam about. Death forces a reset of the stage - fair enough - but placing even one special item incorrectly, even half of a grid space off, usually meant the stage was impossible, forcing a manual reset. Consider the stages themselves often had extremely long and tedious execution paths, and you have one of the most painful puzzle games I've experienced.
The 2010 Steam port of the 2008 WiiWare remake does seem to recognize this fatal error of its source material, introducing a rewind feature to save re-traversal time after either form of failure. This is actually such a good addition that it singlehandedly transforms the game into something playable. With the ability to more freely experiment, you can come to appreciate just how clever some of the stages are, and to what lengths you have to go to save even a single item use for later in the stricter stages. In the underwater world, where you get a bubble powerup that provides limited-use free movement, I spent 10 minutes optimizing my solution to save a single tick of bubble movement. Figuring this stuff out feels like a great victory every time, but I shudder at the thought of the poor souls who spent hours trying the same things in the original.
Toki Tori 2010 ultimately feels less like a remake than it does a project to rescue a game that was outright obsoleted by a decade of paradigm shifts in game design, and for that it is worthy of praise. Nevertheless, I could never fully shake the feeling that I was playing something that would be lambasted as deeply inelegant, unfocused, and garish if it arrived today. It might be one of the best remakes of all time, but that does not make it necessarily worth playing.
The 2010 Steam port of the 2008 WiiWare remake does seem to recognize this fatal error of its source material, introducing a rewind feature to save re-traversal time after either form of failure. This is actually such a good addition that it singlehandedly transforms the game into something playable. With the ability to more freely experiment, you can come to appreciate just how clever some of the stages are, and to what lengths you have to go to save even a single item use for later in the stricter stages. In the underwater world, where you get a bubble powerup that provides limited-use free movement, I spent 10 minutes optimizing my solution to save a single tick of bubble movement. Figuring this stuff out feels like a great victory every time, but I shudder at the thought of the poor souls who spent hours trying the same things in the original.
Toki Tori 2010 ultimately feels less like a remake than it does a project to rescue a game that was outright obsoleted by a decade of paradigm shifts in game design, and for that it is worthy of praise. Nevertheless, I could never fully shake the feeling that I was playing something that would be lambasted as deeply inelegant, unfocused, and garish if it arrived today. It might be one of the best remakes of all time, but that does not make it necessarily worth playing.