As far as supernatural events go, the Tunguska event of 1908 is one heck of a biggy. Having a meteorite explode with over 1,000 times the power of a nuclear bomb just a couple of miles above the surface of the earth is the stuff that cheesy Hollywood disaster films are made of, yet in a remote part of Russia in the early part of last century it actually happened and – despite thankfully happening in one of the world’s more uninhabited places – it caused a heck of a lot of devastation. When something causes trees to be knocked out of the ground some 900 miles away you know you’re dealing with a pretty big bang.

Of course, given the slight air of mystery surrounding the event and the fact that a scientific team did not actually manage to reach the area until a good twenty years after the event, conspiracy theories and all sorts of interesting scenarios crop up. Secret Files: Tunguska – originally released on the PC a couple of years back - deals with the event and puts a slightly sinister twist on it. Having shown a rather impressive CGI version of the event itself, the game opens in an office where an old chap is in the process of being kidnapped by a shadowy bloke in a cloak. His rather confused daughter appears some time later to discover him missing, and it’s from here that your shenanigans kick off.

Anyone well versed in the Monkey Islands, Day of the Tentacles and Sam and Maxes of this world will instantly feel at home with Secret Files, for it is – cue gaps – a point-and-click adventure title. For a good while now the genre has found itself in somewhat similar a position to Amy Winehouse in the way that you wake up each day hearing rumours of their impending extinction. Thankfully, much like Britain’s bedraggled songstress they still somehow manage to keep appearing now and again, and what’s more they still manage to turn out to be very enjoyable for the most part. Secret Files certainly finds itself amongst the enjoyable crowd, and although it has its own quirks and the odd downfall it is a breath of fresh air on a console that really should see more of this type of game.

This is, of course, due to the Wii-mote actually proving rather useful as a pointer. Moving your character about to look at various items and objects requires little more than simply aiming your cursor and pressing the A or B button, whilst cycling through your inventory of stuff is managed by tapping the d-pad, whilst finding a couple of items that can be coupled together gives you a nice little controller vibration. It’s simple, intuitive stuff and it aids your passage into the game massively, leaving you to concentrate on what you’re doing rather than how you’re doing it. Score one for that, then.

Another neat feature that has made the jump from the original title is the ability to click the 1 button to briefly highlight any useful objects on-screen, making smaller and less obvious items slightly more noticeable. In doing this the developers have not only curtailed any issues with people’s televisions not providing the pin-sharp resolution of their PC monitors, but also given aid to those of us who can’t keep a steady hand to save our lives. Having to be millimetre-perfect throughout the entire adventure could have cost me the use of my right hand for a week, and [snip – this sentence can’t possibly end well].

Thus, with no control issues to worry your head about it’s to the game itself that focus will inevitably fall, and whilst it’s good fun for the most part there are a few things that’ll leave you feeling a little bemused. Firstly, the story itself is not exactly a best seller, despite the intriguing nature of the event it’s based upon. At no point do you ever feel that things are really picking up much pace, with lead character Nina and occasional cohort Max shuffling their way through the game’s chapters picking up items and using them in various manners. To give it a fair crack of the whip it does actually build up more of a head of steam toward the end when all sorts of twists, turns and supposed betrayals are thrown into the hat, but for the main part of the game it feels as if things are merely bubbling along on low heat.

As mentioned above, the game divides itself up between just about a dozen chapters, something that doesn’t do the general puzzle solving too many favours. As I kept quibbling about in my reviews of the first Sam and Max season last year, cutting an adventure game such as this up into segments means that it hamstrings the game into offering smaller, more concentrated puzzles rather than over-arching objectives that you work throughout to achieve. It gives the game fair reason to chop and change the location often enough with a number of varied settings, and it does still throw some rather brain taxing puzzles your way in the classic ‘use A with B to form C, use C on D to get E’ kind of formula, but you can’t help but think that with a little more in the way of well-judged long-winded puzzling the game might have been a little more difficult to complete than it ended up being.

But hey, let’s not be too down on it. Whilst the above criticisms do stand true, Secret Files is far from being a bad game. The puzzles remain reasonably interesting throughout, the characters and story still manage to raise interest even if they’re not top quality and the game looks rather swish too with all sorts of lush textures and atmospheric lighting. Sadly this is slightly spoilt by voice acting so bad that you feel like running to the fridge to jam cheese in your ears to block it out, but once more it’s not something that’s going to have you lobbing your Wii-motes through the screen. Overall, the game does more right than it does wrong, and it’s always a nice surprise to have a point-and-click that actually maintains your interest and keeps you clicking away until the end credits.

Thus, you can’t help but say that Secret Files: Tunguska should at least be a game that you consider if you enjoy a slower, more thought-provoking game. It’s the perfect Ying to Mario Galaxy or Metroid Corruption’s Yang, giving you some satisfying logic-based exploration to work your way through. A classic or a system seller it isn’t, but I enjoyed it nonetheless and one can only hope that perhaps this will open the door for future games of this ilk on a platform that so clearly works very well with them.