Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures

It's so rare for a game to capture the spirit and charm of a movie. These games manage that and more. Everything iis perfect: the writing, the humor, the characters. It's just like the wonderfull animated movies. The stories, the new characters, the new locations- all aditions to the classic are just right. The gameplay itself is very satisfying, as the puzzles are logical and their difficulty is well balanced. A must-have for all fans of Wallace & Gromit, and fun adventure games in general.

If you're a fan of the films, then this collection is a delight; exploring the world of Wallace and Gromit is a treat, and you'll find plenty of references, if you look hard enough. The humor is mostly intact, and the absurd situations fit right in with the Wallace and Gromit brand. It's a little weird moving around with the keyboard at first, but it works surprisingly well. They are fairly short, so that may be a deterrent for some of you, but I didn't have a problem with the length. I will say that the first two episodes were my favorite, and the fourth and final episode wasn't great, but overall, it's a worthy collection of adventures.

I like the charm of ‘Wallace & Gromit’, a British series of claymation films and television shows. While I don’t recall which ones I saw, I have fond memories of the series’ artistic directions, the fun dynamics between Wallace and Gromit, and Wallace’s wacky contraptions. Because of that, Telltale Games’ ‘Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures’ easily caught my attention. In ‘Grand Adventures’, you alternate between playing as the cheese-loving, well-intentioned, awkward inventor Wallace, and his resourceful, clever, anthropomorphic dog Gromit. With each episode lasting you anywhere from two to a few hours (depending on your problem-solving prowess), the variety of puzzles in each is decent. There tended to be two or three that would stump me, with the ones in the final episode being most challenging. The simple, clean design of ‘Wallace & Gromit’ is well suited for this adventure game. Telltale Games did a good job recreating the claymation aesthetics of the films and TV shows, including adding fingerprints to the character textures. I played this game at fullscreen 1920 x 1080 resolution. Although ‘Grand Adventures’ supports this screen resolution, graphic textures seem stretched out and low despite having graphics setting at the highest level. I believe this 2009 game may be best enjoyed at a lower screen resolution and in windowed mode on modern hardware. At the time of this review, ‘Grand Adventures’ also includes all 10 one- to three-minute episodes of ‘Wallace and Gromit’s Cracking Contraptions’, which I thoroughly enjoy. As appealing as this extra is -- mainly because I’m a ‘Wallace & Gromit’ fan -- I have to admit this game may be a tough sell for people unfamiliar with the series. This is an entertaining game, but gameplay-wise, ‘Grand Adventures’ is an average adventure game with no selling point or gimmick other than it being a ‘Wallace & Gromit’ game. If you’re indecisive about ‘Grand Adventures’, I recommend you picking it up when it goes on sale.

I wanna get the bad stuff away first: There's quite amount of bugs that almost ruined the game for me. I'm not sure is it because of Windows 11, or what, but the UI is somewhat buggy. I was once able to softlock the game by just pressing a normal interactable object at (maybe idk) wrong time. Also during the game, when I selected the pause menu, I pressed New Game, new menu popped up, like normal. But then for some reason the game thought I was back at the game and I was able to play the game, but the New Game menu screen was still there in my way softlocking me. I had few more, but these were the worst ones. Even after all that, I still really enjoyed my time so far. W&G really does feel appropriate in a point&click type game. Voice acting is on point, even though Wallace is not voiced by Peter Sallis. It was little distracting at first, but overall good replacement. Also the game is pretty easy to figure out, which works for me, because I'm bad at these types of games. If you're a W&G fan, this will give you what you want. Not really much to complain about, other than the bugs.

As is common with many adventure games, there will be those items that go together, that shouldn't go together. Things that don't make a bit of sense in reality, and they cause much angst in your eventual wanderings of near aimlessness. You know what I'm talking about, fellow adventurers. This game though does a very good job at weeding that garbage out. Not to say it isn't there, but most of the things you will need to focus on are noted in the conversations etc, as they would be were someone giving you instructions in real life, instead of, "Well, you need to go do something, no idea how you're going to do it, have fun!" Similar quotes are equivocally placed in most adventure games at one point. Thus its nice to see, in addition to the awesome graphics and vocals, that Telltale has done something that doesn't make a person want to slam their head into a wall until they have an aneurysm. Hugs Telltale.