The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So, Telltale sent me an e-mail saying that the last episode of Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Adventures, the Bogey Man, was out! And as I’m downloading it, I’m like “Wait a second, I never played the third episode.” So I did. It’s called Muzzled!. It was fun. I also got bonus points for spotting Jake Rodkin of Idle Thumbs fame in the credits.

But yeah, I’ve talked in previous Wallace and Gromit blog posts about how Telltale tends to have a very clear act structure. However, I was kind of sad that they dropped actually pointing that out in this episode. I thought it worked very well just giving in and bringing attention to it during The Last Resort. There’s nothing too out of the ordinary from the act structure in this one, besides one or two deviations, or at least things that I noticed.

First off, the other two games had you starting out as Wallace, in order to complete this or that to, you know, set up the wacky situation. This dispenses with that, and you only control Wallace in the third act, which is kind of interesting. It works, of course, but I’m always more of a fan of controlling someone who can tell me helpful and hopefully humorous things about what I click on, so I’m not always a big fan of using Gromit the whole time. So that’s a deviation. There’s also a fairly big deviation story-wise, in that there is a villain in this episode. That’s not a spoiler or anything, it’s, you know, kind of completely painfully clear the first time you see him, not to mention the title of the episode is Muzzled!. This too, is an interesting deviation, because suddenly the puzzles revolve less around dealing with Wallace’s wacky hijinks and more around, you know, normal adventure game stuff. It’s a nice break, but perhaps not as true to the source material.

In any case, the main thing I wanted to point out is that there is a very clear example of the game training me for later. A good example of what I’m talking about would be Portal. It trains you to deal with future, more complicated situations, by starting you with easy situations, and then introducing an extremely similar, but more complicated one, so you can see what else you can do. This is the first time I can recall a Telltale game really doing that, and awhile it’s not going to go unnoticed by anyone, the fact that the solutions to the puzzles in the first act become the building blocks to solutions in the second act lets those puzzles be a little bit more complex, which is certainly appreciated.

Still, the lack of Wallace for most of the game cuts down on the amount of dialog. I mean, I don’t doubt that it takes a lot of hard work to keep the game working as intuitive as it is without a protagonist that can talk, but at the same time, I really do take these Telltale episodes as interactive little TV shows or whatever. I really am mostly there for the dialog, as the puzzles can be fun, but are rarely so awesome as to carry it by itself. So I worry this one might end up being the weaker episode of the set. Still, it’s certainly fun. More fun than, say, the Bone games.
(Aside: Along with my purchase of Tales of Monkey Island, I got any Telltale game free. Well, the only one I didn’t own was The Great Cow Race, the second Bone game. I’ve tried to play it, I really have, but it is so painfully obvious how far Telltale has come. Their games are so much more polished, and so much more fun, and the fact that I’ve never read Bone makes me have basically 0 interest in what’s going on. So when I say this is the weakest of the Wallace and Gromit games, it’s still much more interactive, well-paced, and fun than that. Probably better than many of the first Sam and Max episodes, too.)
So yeah, play it. And I’ll get to The Bogey Man soon. Maybe. You never know.