Game Reviews

Zuki's Quest

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Zuki's Quest
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| Zuki's Quest

Sometimes, the worst worries in a young girl's life involve homework or melodramatic friends.

Other times, the biggest problem a young girl faces is navigating spike-lined hallways while being held at gravity's mercy.

Zuki's Quest is a challenging "turn-based puzzle platformer" in which we follow one young lady on a mission to stick it to the forces of nature.

Zuki's Quest stars Zuki, an explorer girl who finds herself on a mysterious island filled with Indiana Jones-esque temples and golden idols.

The chief of a hostile native village sends Zuki out to collect idols, and she complies. Lots of levels involving gravity manipulation and trap dodging ensue.

Gravity is for chumps

The Zuki's Quest storyline is pretty thin (and, y'know, slightly stereotypical - cannibalistic island natives and all that), but it presents us with a good excuse to get out there and show gravity who's boss.

There are three coins scattered across each stage in Zuki's Quest that you need to pick up before Zuki's allowed to progress.

Problem is, Zuki can't simply walk from Point A to Point B. Instead, the temples' gravity shifts in whatever direction you swipe, and you must indirectly guide Zuki to her goal. Swipe down to fall down. Swipe up to fall up. And so on.

But what Hollywood temple is complete without traps, eh? Nearly every stage in Zuki's Quest is filled with spikes, ghosts, and huge stone blocks that shift with gravity. If you make a false swipe, Zuki risks exploding into an unpleasant mess of bones and blood.

You can enter any time you like, but you can never leave

The core mechanics for Zuki's Quest are easy to grasp. Before long, however, you'll be scratching your head and wondering how to get the little ginger girl from place to place without turning her into a pancake.

It's a challenging game, sure, and the developer ramps the difficulty up quickly. You're not exactly eased into the action, let's say. It's either do or die.

But the absence of tutorials and hand-holding will be welcomed by anyone simply craving a gravity-based game that's as solid as a stone idol's behind.

Despite Zuki's Quest's difficult nature, you will keep attempting to crack its toughest levels again and again. It helps that stages reload without a delay when you die - makes it that much harder to change your mind and back out.

Zuki's Quest

Once you are gripped within Zuki's Quest field of gravity, you won't be able to let go without a fight
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