FROM GOLDENEYE TO GARDENING: THE FANTASTIC FOLIAGE OF BONSAI BARBER
You will be forgiven for overlooking the release of Zoonami‘s WiiWare debut Bonsai Barber several weeks back — I might have too, if I didn’t know firsthand the pedigree of the studio behind it. Zoonami is, as it turns out, the studio founded by former Rare designer Martin Hollis, one of the foundational design team behind Nintendo 64 Bond shooter GoldenEye 007, who left in the midst of Perfect Dark development to strike out at his own studio.
In the intervening years, Zoonami had thus far only eked out a single game, DS/PSP minigame/Sudoku mashup Zendoku (which, much to its credit, is the only Sudoku game that’s actually managed to hold my attention for more than a round or two and is well worth investigating), with another two years passing until Barber‘s release.
Of course, there’s nothing that overtly ties Goldeneye and Bonsai together to say that fans of one would be instantly drawn to the other, except to say that both are, truly, exceptional games.
That, and both show that classic Nintendo propensity to bridge demographic gaps and are genuine “for everyone” gaming, as it’s soft pastel design might lead you to believe. But what exactly is Bonsai Barber? Basically precisely what it says on the tin: gaming’s first best crossover of zen-like topiary and the classic social experience of the small-town barbershop.
As you start up the game each day that you visit the barbershop, you’re greeted with a slate of characters who all need their lush, procedurally generated limbs trimmed, each specifically requesting particular styles and color schemes. And that sets up one of Bonsai‘s smartest tricks: once that slate is done for the day, so are you — a handful of chops, some 20 minutes of gaming, and you’re set, and have to wait another real-world day for the next customers to arrive: perfect bite-size daily play.
And that, in turn, sets up the game’s next smartest trick: over the course of weeks, as the characters live out their daily lives, they’ll occasionally need to get a quick trim before going off on holiday. Carelessly hack away at their leaves and they’ll have a terrible time (as you would [first hand experience]), do them justice and they’ll send you a postcard — straight to your Wii’s message board.
Zoonami have done an exemplary job of giving real emotional depth to what would otherwise be a cluster of fractally fanned foliage, but that’s window-dressing to the core experience, about which you can only say, of course a hair trimming game is exactly what the Wii needed and excels at.
Swapping between both your scissors and clippers, your every twist and position of the Wiimote lets you carefully shape the cast’s ‘dos into increasingly challenging and unlikely shapes (the stoplight, the T-shirt), in an experience that genuinely does conjure up a zen-like calm.
That’s a lot of words devoted simply to snipping leaves, but they’re not wasted if only to illuminate what is as quietly rewarding an experience as we’ve never had in games before: even without the family for it to be friendly for (which it undoubtedly is, for its cooperative multiplayer and for its ‘for the grown ups’ innuendo, the hallmark of quality kid’s stuff), its an essential addition to the WiiWare lineup.
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