Review of Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures: The Bogey Man

Wallace & Gromit’s last installment in their Grand Adventures, The Bogey Man, is a delightful romp and a fine finish to their first season of episodic adventure gaming. It offers a different vibe that most other adventure games you might find, but that’s a good thing. It’s different in the same way the Wallace & Gromit show was different than most other cartoons out there. The Bogey Man faithfully recreates that calmly paradoxical world Wallace and Gromit live in, and in the process gives us great puzzles, fantastic characters and a lot of fun.

The Bogey Man episode sees Wallace inducted into the local country club run by an abrasive Scotsman, complete with kilt and a thick Scottish brogue. I have to say, one of my favorite parts of the game was listening to Duncan McBiscuit mercilessly tease Wallace in his wonderful accent. In fact, the voice acting is a significant strength for the game. Excellent voice acting is a hallmark of Telltale Games, the developer of Wallace & Gromit games, so it should come as no surprise that this game is fun to listen to.

The game design follows closely the look and feel of a Wallace & Gromit short film, right down to Gromit’s enormous, expressive eyebrows and Wallace’s wide-spread ears. If you have the image quality set high enough, you could actually be fooled into thinking one of the cutscenes is taken directly from their films. Equally imperative to pulling off a believable Wallace & Gromit world is the DIY gadgets and tools strewn throughout the game. Honestly, how could you create a story for this man and his dog without some cockeyed contraption? My favorite puzzle at the end of the game is one giant clockwork construction that just feels like classic Wallace & Gromit.

Of course the feel of classic Wallace & Gromit doesn’t match those of many adventure games. Wallace & Gromit isn’t necessarily fast-paced, and the suspense only ever rises to a quiet desperation that is completely faithful to the Wallace & Gromit canon. But I’ll also reiterate: It’s a refreshing change. The humor is understated but no less enjoyable. Let’s be clear here; this is not a Monkey Island game, so don’t go into it looking for a wave of gags and one-liners.

About three-quarters of the way through the game, it occurred to me that Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventure games reminded me of a classic adventure game: The Neverhood. And that’s not just because The Neverhood was claymation either. It too had a sort of calmness and quiet humor about it that made it fun to explore the world and discover what wacky things lay around each corner. I consider The Neverhood to be one of the best adventure games ever made, and I’m happy to consider Wallace & Gromit a spiritual descendant of it.

That’s not to say The Bogey Man isn’t without flaws. Sometimes the puzzle solving got a little too FedExy. By that I mean you have to travel back and forth between the same sites to get one object and bring it back again and again as if you are just a delivery boy. I fully acknowledge that the back and forth trips to solve puzzles are a part of almost any adventure game, but it seemed a bit too frequent in The Bogey Man.

Another complaint about the game is that the area you can explore is really quite limited. I would have liked to see the game branch out into new parts of town, or allow access inside more buildings. Sometimes The Bogey Man just felt a little too confining.

Regardless of these small gripes, The Bogey Man closes out the first season of Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures perfectly. It has engaging characters, a fun-filled plot, no shortage of silly gadgets and a lot of heart. In a time where adventure gaming has lost its chic for most of the gaming world, The Bogey Man proves there are still people out there who know how to make a rewarding adventure game.