Review: Wallace And Gromit’s Grand Adventures Finale: The Bogey Man

With a hearty laugh (and some tears), it’s time for us to take a look at the final episode of the Wallace and Gromit Grand Adventures series.

It feels like forever ago that I reviewed the first Wallace and Gromit episode; despite this, it’s only been just over five months. But Telltale Games have done a impressive job every time. We can tell from a lot of bad examples that capturing the world of a movie, series, book or cartoon and adapting it into a video game is an almost impossible feat.  Somehow, though, Telltale knew how to tell four new stories of everyone’s favourite animation duo without any major compromises.

The Bogey Man starts right where we left Wallace and Gromit in the last episode, (skip to the next paragraph if you haven’t played Episode 3) where Wallace has just proposed to his next door neighbour Ms. Flitt by accident, and to make matters worse, Ms. Flitt said yes!  In the meantime, Wallace has also set up a detective agency.  Episode 4 starts you off as Gromit, trying to find a way to stop Wallace’s marriage mistake so in comes the country club Prickly Thicket, a club Ms. Flitt’s great aunt strongly disapproves of.

What makes the final episode very different from the first three is that the difficulty has been amped up quite a bit. The puzzles are a lot longer, and the clues aren’t quite as in-your-face as with the other episodes.  Not to mention the final action sequence really made me use my head for once.  It took me quite a while to figure out some of the puzzles, which is something that was rarely necessary in the previous entries.  All in all a great improvement in the gameplay department.

The fourth episode really shows that the series needs to be played in order; certain subjects from previous episodes will reappear, and even you can also run into one or two characters from the first couple of episodes.  As with all episodic games, it would’ve been nice if we got to see more new locations that weren’t in the previous episodes.  After all, West Wallaby Street is a great home base, but considering the game’s relatively short playtime (3, maybe 4 hours if you’re good at puzzles), it might’ve been better to show a few more varied locations.

The only real issue I had with this particular episode was the rather inconsistent load times; sometimes the game would load instantly, and other times I would find myself looking at a frozen screen for a good thirty seconds.  Apart from some minor character texture issues, though, I didn’t experience any real technical problems, consistent with the rest of the series.

Over the past few years Telltale has almost single-handedly proven that the point and click genre is very much still alive.  It’s always been one of my favourite genres, and I honestly can’t wait to see what else Telltale has in store for us.  Between this game, the revival of Sam and Max and now even the remake of Monkey Island, it would appear that point and click fans are in heaven. Hopefully we will see a new Wallace and Gromit series in the future.

Verdict: If you haven’t tried out the Wallace and Gromit series by now, I don’t think you ever will. The series is a definite must buy, though the typical English humor can be a bit strong at some points.

Played on: PC

Also available on: Coming to Xbox Live Arcade in the near future.

Price: $34.99 (includes all episodes)