Wallace & Gromit Grand Adventures: Episode 4 – The Bogey Man Review

Far from a bogey, closer to a birdie.

It’s hard to believe we finally reached the series finale for Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Adventures. This season had its ups and downs, but the closer is far from being an out-of-bounds shot, if you’d pardon the metaphor.

[image1]The Bogey Man begins right after Muzzled!, just as Wallace is opening a new business venture in the form of a detective agency and is also trying his best to get out of the latest jam he’s gotten himself into: marriage to his next door neighbor, Miss Flitt. Her great aunt is in town to make the wedding preparations, and at the same time, the local country club, Prickley Thicket is looking for new members. What one has to do with the other is probably the question that will pop in your mind, and it’s exactly what you’ll have to find out in this episode.

It won’t be difficult to figure out the reason why Wallace must become a member: The story centers around the club’s golf course land deed and the mystery surrounding its location, and how its discovery will effect the entire populace of West Wallaby Street and Wallace’s future marriage. Bogey Man‘s story serves as a nice closure to this season, providing an interesting setting for most of the puzzles and much more of the clever situations we’ve come to love.

[image2]Compared to the difficulty in past episodes, there isn’t much of a difference here, as all puzzles depend on items that are scattered around the environments Gromit and Wallace will visit and clues that are much more important this time, coming in the form of notes and loose book pages. Telltale has preferred to strip away the coordination-based scenarios present in past episodes in favor of more complex puzzles that take various stages to complete, in a series of light memorization patterns.

You won’t be visiting the entirety of Wallace’s house this time around, as most of it gets closed off right away, in favor of having a completely new area in the form of the country club. That’s where most of the puzzles will concentrate at first, moving out to town for a period as well. Just walking around the town is its own reward, with numerous nods to past episodes. On the other hand, like any of the episodic Telltale games, knowledge of the prior titles in the series isn’t required to jump into Bogey Man, but seriously recommended!

Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Adventures Episode Four: The Bogey Man is a slightly longer episode in the series, taking around three to four hours to reach its conclusion. While we have no word from Telltale on whether we will ever see a Wallace and Gromit Season 2, Bogey Man works well as a finale of a series that takes an unlikely pick of an intellectual property – this clay animation series of shorts from Aardman Studios – and turns it into a highly enjoyable and well-rounded season of adventure games.