The point and click adventure genre has been around since the days of the first desktop PCs and has seen giants of the industry rise and fall; Sierra had King’s Quest and Leisure Suit Larry, LucasArts had Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion, Psygnosis had Discworld, and then of course there’s Telltale Games’ Sam and Max. Characteristic among many of these successful titles is one thing -- a great sense of humor that has the ability to keep the player engaged.

Wallace and Gromit (relatively new-comers to this scene) certainly have a unique style all their own, and fans of the stop motion animation series will enjoy how intricately detailed the character models are -- you can actually see fingerprints on the “clay” of the eponymous heroes. While the environments are sharply rendered, the computer generated scenery won’t tax any computer systems and at times looks bland and boring next to the outstanding protagonists.

As much fidelity there is to the source material in appearance, the sense of humor found in the show doesn’t come through as well. While this might be attributed to the short duration of the game (it is easily under five hours even for the puzzley-challenged), the creators of the series ought to be used to working with episodic content; especially at this stage, with The Bogey Man being the fourth downloadable W&G title and Ardman Animations having made W&G shorts since 1989. But the lack of zing doesn’t come from brevity, it comes from poor pacing, which is an unfortunate side effect of allowing someone else to interact with the timing of your carefully planned jokes.

Don’t hit the jump. Pull the lever on the wall and let a series of intricate devices hit the jump for you.

If you haven’t seen Wallace and Gromit before, the usual draw of the show involves seeing Wallace and his crazy inventions fail, while his faithful mutt Gromit is forced to clean up. Here in Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Adventure: The Bogey Man there are a few stellar moments where you feel like you are acting out the show, but both fans and gamers will inevitably want more. The scope and pacing of the game is laid out early on when Gromit must extricate Wallace from an accidental marriage proposal (and acceptance) which happened the previous night/episode. Thankfully this little intro establishing the narrative drive of the game is the only time you’ll say to yourself, “Come on, stop talking. I want to play.” While it’s good that this is the only time you’ll feel that way, it makes for an underwhelming first impression.

Once you begin the adventure of joining a country club to make Wallace’s new fiancée hate his guts, you’ll realize that the completely unhelpful tutorial only really explained that the “W,A,S,D,” keys move you around, and that you should click on things to interact with them. More helpful would have been the advice that you can press “Q” or “E” to cycle through any interactable items onscreen, or that you can hold down the “Tab” key to highlight everything you can take some sort of action with. Because this is the finale of Telltale Games’ W&G series they shouldn’t expect to have to hold your hand, but a Tutorial just isn’t doing its job otherwise.

Added to the list of unusual complaints is also the fact that this game has no loading screen. While developers such as Rockstar have been striving to achieve no loading screens for years, when moving Wallace or Gromit between the Town Square, Prickly Thicket Country Club and Wallace’s house (the only three areas in the game), rather than give the player any indication that the game is loading the next area it simply sits there, audio continuing to play, as you wonder whether or not Windows Vista has locked up. Again.

Much to the game’s credit, the audio in this faux loading screen is the genuine article. While many fans weren’t betting on the 88-year-old Peter Sallis’ ability to voice Wallace for the quadfecta of games, he has in fact lent his talent up to the last. What also further exemplifies the game’s strength here in the audio department is the fact that the music and other sound effects (including other characters' voice work) only became tiring in one instance, where certain perilous screams were repeated one too many times. It isn’t too often you can play a game for several hours, wandering through the same three environments, and not want to turn the volume down.

As with any great click adventure game there are shining moments where the one off-handed comment a character made four hours earlier finally becomes the answer to a puzzle, making you feel exceedingly clever for having figured it out. But as often as this happens in The Bogey Man, you’ll be just as likely to get stuck and feel a little frustrated. Naturally this comes with the territory, but the “hint” system works nothing like one would expect. Rather than text boxes or any sort of helpful message popping up once you’ve been stationary for too long, the game drops subtle dialogue clues from various background characters. Once you realize this is what’s happening you’ll usually appreciate how well integrated it is into the system, but when the nudges in the right direction become more like shoves, you may think rather than turning the hint system up from “sometimes” to “often,” you actually changed it from “subtle” to “condescending.”

As far as the core puzzles are concerned, there is some humor found there, but most are standard fare. Later in the game you will encounter a unique twist on the age old Sliding Block puzzle that almost instantly justifies the purchase -- putting restrictions on certain pieces so they can’t be slid next to each other is not only a brilliant addition of another layer of logic to a simple formula, in practice it’s hilarious to see. But as wonderful as this fresh concept is, it is unfortunately only one piece of the whole ensemble, the rest of which doesn’t hold a candle to that kind of ingenuity.

Overall this game makes for a decent title to play, despite the fact that it feels disappointingly short with little replay value (which is more a limitation of the genre than it is a flaw of this game). Fans and owners of the first three episodes will certainly enjoy The Bogey Man, so long as they aren’t expecting much of a denouement, and casual gamers looking to jump into the series won’t feel lost or in over their heads either. Still, if you were never a huge fan of these sorts of games to begin with, The Bogey Man won’t win any new converts -- the game is heavy on the pointing and clicking, and consequently can end up feeling more like Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Investigation, rather than a “bold, usually risky undertaking.”