Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures: Episode 1 Hands-On

It would be difficult to find a more quintessentially British production than Wallace & Gromit. While the series has enjoyed international success, not to mention a movie and three Oscars, the characters have never outgrown their unnamed Northern England village. It's somewhat strange, then, that the stars' latest video game is being handled by the California outfit Telltale Games. Thankfully, the studio has an appreciation for the series and has hired Private Eye writer Tristan Davies to pen the story, while also receiving the full support of Aardman Animation, the pair's creator. It is also a dab hand at the adventure genre, having created the updated Sam & Max adventure series and Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People.

Like those games, Wallace & Gromit will be released episodically, under the umbrella of Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures. Four episodes have been planned so far: Fright of the Bumblebees, The Last Resort, Muzzled, and Boogeyman. Telltale CEO Dan Connors is not sure when the first episode will land on Xbox Live and the PC, but he wants to schedule it so it doesn't clash with the Xbox Live release of Sam & Max. However, with the first episode now finished, expect it to be sooner rather than later. In fact, the first episode is so complete that it has a demo. This demo is what we got to play at a recent Xbox event in London, with Connors on hand to tell us more about it.

In keeping with the movies, each game episode of Wallace & Gromit will feature some sort of madcap business scheme for Wallace and Gromit to occupy themselves with, and in Fright of the Bumblebees, it's a honey business. We had to fill in parts of the story, as the narrative skipped about in our demo, but it appears that Wallace needs to fulfill a large order of honey, and in the process, he unleashes an army of giant bees in the town. In one memorable scene, Wallace is captured by a giant lipstick-wearing bee, and it was our job to chase him down using Gromit's van and a variety of gadgets and gizmos. In typical adventure game fashion, though, you have to use a feather to tickle the bee so that it releases Wallace and you can drive him back to safety.

The interface is intuitive: you use the left anologue stick to walk Wallace around the 3D environment and the right stick to point to interactive objects in the world. The X button pulls up the inventory, allowing you to combine items with other objects or people, and it's all very familiar for those who have played adventure games before. The puzzles we saw were simple, such as finding a pepper pot to replace Gromit's broken chess piece, but Connors admits that this is to appeal to the duo's younger fans. With this in mind, there will also be a hints system, which the game will automatically deploy if it senses people are struggling, but Connors promises it won't be intrusive or too obvious in what it suggests.

While these new games aren't being developed in the UK, the team is in constant communication with Aardman Animation and even records the voice acting in London. Sadly, Peter Sallis hasn't provided the voice of Wallace for this game, but his impersonator does a good job of replicating Wallace's endearing ignorance. Aardman also provided Telltale with the original plasticine models, which have been lovingly re-created in-game, complete with the thumb marks and scratches from the real things. There will also be plenty of new characters, such as next-door neighbour and love interest Felicity, as well as a crazy old army veteran called Major Crum.

The four episodes of Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures will be hitting Xbox Live and the PC later in the year, and Telltale promises that they will be similar in length to the Sam & Max episodes the company has previously worked on. No price point has been announced as yet, but we'll bring you more information as we get it.