Wallace & Gromit Demo

Telltale Games is letting us know the Wallace & Gromit Grand Adventures demo is now (exclusively, at the time of writing) available at Yahoo and FilePlanet. After an admittedly brief play-through, as the short demo is only really designed to acquaint new players with the generic mechanics of the adventure game genre, I still found myself surprised enough!

The tutorial
The tutorial

It’s not that Telltale doesn’t have a great track record, but even after three successful attempts, turning a critically acclaimed and beloved property into a game series is always a daunting prospect.

Luckily for us fans, Wallace & Gromit does not deviate much from the core principles of earlier Telltale output, and as the company has long perfected their system of less is more, we have here a game that is aesthetically very pleasant both to the eyes and the ears: A distinctly English horn section blowing away jolly tunes in the background of an idyllic neighbourhood that’s exactly like its plasticine-moulded Aardman animation counterpart.

The demo area scenery is modest and tightly wound together, with little room for sightseeing. In this manner, the game does cater to its slightly more casual target audience by forcing players to focus on the most immediate tasks at hand, but this also means that pixel-based nitpicking or aimless wandering are altogether absent. The curious off-the-wall puzzles seemed logical enough – at least within the game’s own little wacky universe! To put this statement into perspective, one of the demo sequences contains a bloated-up anthropomorphic Dame Edna lookalike. Good show.

If you’ve already played Sam & Max, Strong Bad or Bone, there’s also a new interface trick to be discovered: Players now press down shift (or R, if you’re left-handed) to bring out a sidebar inventory. Since Wallace moves on screen with WASD, the solution feels elegant and suits the game’s minimalistic point-and-click control set and overall interface very well.

Reflecting more on the, err, the Edna Factor, the greatest challenge for players may very well lie within the game’s register of humour. It’s not to say the writing is inaccessible, on the contrary: The game is adorably silly, carefree and light-hearted in tone. It’s just that having a perfectly adult adventure game that isn’t snarky, mean-spirited or at the very least ironic is very, very strange. Completely gone is the psychedelic witticism of Sam & Max or the /r/-rated riposting of Strong Bad.

I even began to wonder whether I should be playing something edgier, you know, something with more Vin Diesel in it, like Assault on Dark Athena or Wheelman! The fact that the characters are completely disarming in their earnestness – much in the same way as the original Aardman animations are –  definitely helped me overcome this slippery, diesely slope. I still feel the biggest question, in terms of Wallace & Gromit, is the question of audience; On the one hand, we must ask ourselves: Who is the game series really catered to? Children? Adults? Something in-between?

On the other hand, are there really any people on this planet who might not potentially enjoy Wallace & Gromit? I think that’s the very thing that Telltale is ultimately banking on, too.

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