The point and click adventure genre has been dwindling in the last few years. It's not that the game quality has gone down over time - we still have great games such as Sam & Max keeping point and click alive on PC - it's just that many gamers have moved on from the classic adventure games of yore, and onto bigger budget, more flashy games. The Wii seems like the perfect home for this genre, with the excellent Zack & Wiki proving just how it should be done. On the other hand however, the bad port of Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None earlier in the year is an example of how not to do it. Does Secret Files: Tunguska, a 2006 PC game, fall into either of these categories, or sit uncomfortably somewhere in between?

As the name would suggest, the game centres around the Tunguska incident, which to those unacquainted with Russian history, was a massive and unexplained explosion that occurred suddenly back in 1908. The game explores the reasons for this incident through the eyes of Nina Kalenkov, the daughter of a museum owner who is linked to the explosion. The story on the whole is very good, using intrigue and tension to the fullest. It may not keep you glued to your TV screen, but the way that scraps of information of fed to you a bit at a time makes the plot worth paying attention to - if you can get through the whole game, that is. This will be great for fans of mystery novels, as it is both well thought out and fairly original. If you like to be told everything in one go however, you'll hate what's on offer here.

Secret Files is everything you would expect from a point and click adventure, with little more to offer. The entire game can be played with just the Wiimote, although having a nunchuck for movement makes things easier to control. You can carry out two different actions on most objects - examine them with B or use them with A. You literally point and click your way through the game, picking up items, inserting them in places, combining inventory items, and the other standard actions that have featured in the genre before. The rest of the controls don't do much to mix up the formula, with the obvious addition to a Wii port failing to make the cut. There is barely any Wii motion movement in the game, which is actually a positive thing in the long term; adding unnecessary waggle was one of the downfalls of Agatha Christie, so its absence here is a good sign. The 1 button is the only other button you will end up using, which allows you to see every piece of scenery that you can interact with. This helps when you don't notice an otherwise invisible hole in the floor, one that you can retrieve a vital key from. This is a point and click game, and as such, the controls are meant to be simple. Secret Files works in this regard, even if it does little to tap the Wii's full potential.

Solving puzzles and working out how to complete tasks makes up the biggest portion of this adventure, as Nina runs into more than her fair share of testing obstacles on her journey to find her father. These can range from moving coins across a board to fixing a child's bike, all of which are either of two difficulties. The puzzles are incredibly simple, and if you find one of them too difficult to handle then Nintendo might have a certain Brain Training game that might help you. If one of the tasks isn't this easy then it will most likely be impossible to work out. When this happens - and I assure you that it will - you must rely upon the cheapest tactic possible; trial and error. Attempting to combine every single item in your inventory with each other, and then with everything you can interact with in the room is as tedious as it sounds, and you'll do it more times than you should have to. Some of the combinations that you need just don't make sense, and it makes you wonder what was going through the developers' minds when they decided on these combinations of items. This is a shame, because the actual mixing of items, and the inventory system, a pop-up menu that is activated by the d-pad, is very slick.

For a conversion of a PC game that originally came out in 2006, Secret Files: Tunguska looks okay. However, the PS3 and Wii came out in the same year and the launch titles for the Wii look better than this. There may not have been an adventure game in the launch window, but even so, Secret Files looks pathetic compared to the likes of Twilight Princess. The character models are good, but the 2D static environments are lacklustre in comparison. Secret Files has the sort of haze that is often found in games of this genre, appearing over objects that are supposedly in the distance, which doesn't cover up the questionable quality of the visuals here. The voice acting on the other hand is surprisingly good; Nina should be an annoying character, but her voice makes her bearable throughout some dodgy lines of dialogue that are commonplace in adventure games. The music is non-existent in most places, and the lack of any sort of musical score in certain areas is actually quite eerie. What is here is good, but there isn't enough of it to be memorable. The game's aesthetics are not where they should be, especially since the original game only came out two years ago. If this was a ten-year-old game then you would forgive the developers for dodgy graphics if the rest of the port was perfect - House of the Dead for example - but here the graphics would have looked dated in 1998, never mind 2008.

If you enjoy a bit of point and click adventuring then there is some entertainment to be found in Secret Files: Tunguska. There are problems, but fans of the genre will be able to look past these imperfections and see that this is a far superior game to Agatha Christie. But even so, this is still an average game, especially when compared to the best of the Wii library. It falls between the two point and click games already available, although it definitely sways more towards the low than the top end of the scale. Please let this be the last PC to Wii port of a point and click game, oh, wait... Sam & Max has just been announced [Hurrah! Surely that one can't go too far wrong? Ed]. Secret Files: Tunguska isn't a terrible point and click game - it's just not a very good one either.

Reviewed by Sam Atkins for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).