Going back to playing Telltale’ Wallace and Gromit games after playing their recent Monkey Island title is a bit of a let-down. It feels like a step back in many ways. Gone is the somewhat useful mouse-based movement system. Gone are the different dialogue options. In fact, the only thing that feels new and interesting in Bogey Man, the final Wallace and Gromit episode from Telltale, is the setting.
It helps that the previous episodes mostly took place in one of two areas: Wallace’s house on West Wallaby St., and the town’s center. All of the cast are back, from Ms. Flitt to Mr. Paneer to the annoying Constable. This episode starts out innocently enough, as Wallace and Gromit games go. In the previous episode, Wallace mistakenly got down on one knee in front of Ms. Flitt. She mistook it as a marriage proposal (it was not, of course), and now Wallace and the long-suffering Gromit must find a way to escape this most terrible of predicaments.
Thus begins the most boring phase of the episode, whereby you collect items as Wallace and Gromit, click on people to hear them (and Wallace) talk, and use some items from your inventory on the environment around you. It’s a bad sign when a game manages to feel old and tired in the opening minutes, and well Telltale has kept that filmic Wallace and Gromit spark alive in the game, as a game, it’s pretty dull.
The hardly revolutionary item combination puzzles from Tales of Monkey Island are nowhere to be found. Here, you’ll pick what to click on, and hopefully you’ll click on it in the right order. This is mitigated by the fact that after the dull first act, Wallace finds himself faced with the episode’s primary antagonist/problem. His troubles are twofold: first, to escape from his dreaded impending matrimony, he grifts his way into a local country club, a club hated by his Intended’s Aunt Prudence.Unfortunately, the club is in danger of closure, thanks to the jealous constable Dibbons (he didn’t get invited to the club).
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