Wallace and Grommit Adventures: The Bogey Man Review
In an odd, sort of unfortunate, way I was looking forward to this being the last “Wallace and Grommit” game for TellTale. While the games properly channel the wit and charm of Nick Park’s creations, but they didn’t make for very good adventure games, despite TellTale’s best efforts.
Happily, “The Bogey Man” finishes the series off strongly, showing TellTale was able to learn well from their mistakes. The controls are still terrible (and it seems TellTale is now beholden to them), but the puzzles are more challenging, interesting, and most importantly, fun.
“The Bogeyman” has a nice story that picks up immediately where “Muzzled” left off, with Wallace trying to wriggle out of his impending (and accidental) engagement to Ms. Flit, by joining an exclusive country club that the Flits cannot stand. Hilarity, of course, ensues.
Wallace and Grommit are split up for a majority of the game again, which makes no sense to me, but you spend most of your time as Wallace, which works the best, I think. He’s able to provide feedback about puzzles to players, and interact more directly with the NPCs, which is always an issue during the Grommit sequences, which have never felt intuitive.
Extra Features:
There’s an elongated trailer going over the previous episodes as an advertisement for the complete set, but nothing else.
Technical:
There are some odd path finding bugs thanks to the weirdly direct camera angles. Also, the graphics are a bit buggier this time around than I remember them being in the past. The models all have “cracks” in them through which you can see the background. It’s not game breaking by any means, but it is rather distracting, and they’re not in joints or movable body parts, so it should’ve been fixed.
Graphics:
The characters, except for the aforementioned issue, are all very well animated as usual. It’s nice to see that they put a little variety into the animation this time as well, as they sort of fell back on a lot of the same stock animations for the previous games.
The backgrounds are sort of infuriating, and one look at the Prickly Thicket clubhouse, and you’ll know exactly what I mean. The thing is gorgeous, and if that’s the level to which they could’ve animated the other three games in the series, then it’s too bad this is the last one, because this is pretty fantastic.
The weirdest thing, is that they block a lot of the old areas off, which fine. But they do it by cutting off your camera angles, which is strange. In the past, any area that you couldn’t get into was treated with some jokey reason why it was blocked off (crazy bees in the cellar, cows in the living room), but this time? You just can’t swing the camera that way. It feels odd and forced.
Sound:
As you might imagine, with Wallace at the forefront, the dialog is much more important, and it really helps the humor here. There’s less reliance on sight gags (though they’re there), and a much better script than the previous episodes, with the possible exception of episode 2.
Another good musical effort, but nothing terribly exciting. There’s an extra song if you fiddle with the radio that I actually liked more than any of the other ambient music because it sounded like something out of one of the “Sam and Max” games, but other than that, the music just kind of sits there and sets the mood.
Replay Value:
No real reason to be replaying this episode, as most of the funny scenes and dialog will be played with the first playthrough.
Final Score: 8/10
Here’s the thing. On one hand, I’m happy this is the last episode, because TellTale obviously struggled to put this series together. It had it’s moments, but overall it was a rough transition to the Adventure game genre for Wallace and Grommit.
However, the hardest thing about it, was that they almost got this right. This last episode was the perfect example of what the games could’ve been. It’s lovely to look at, has a few good laughs, and puts everything in just the right context. If every episode was like “The Bogey Man” then Wallace and Grommit would’ve been a wonderful series. As it is, it’s a great closing chapter to an entertaining, yet frustrating collection.
If you’re interested in taking a look at the game, you can download a copy of the PC Demo at the TellTale Website.