The lovely people at Telltale are doing a Wallace & Gromit game. I find this quite exciting, not only because I’m a fan of the short films, but also because it’s the kind of setting where the convoluted puzzle logic of the adventure game genre actually fits the personalities of the characters. This is exactly how it should be, but very often isn’t, because game designers by and large believe themselves to be constrained by the conventions of the genre they’re working in. It’s why we have all those clean-cut, preppy, Abercrombie-wearing adventure game protagonists, exemplified by April Ryan of The Longest Journey fame, building elaborate contraptions out of inflatable ducks and clamps instead of just talking to people, as they would in the real world. Wallace and Gromit, on the other hand, are eccentric inventor types, so they have a real excuse. When I’m going to be solving puzzles as them, I’m going to actually feel like I’m them, rather than like I’m solving a random obstacle put in there by the game designers so I won’t breeze through the game in two hours.

Okay, so maybe tailoring story to gameplay is the easier way out, as opposed to coming up with new forms of gameplay to fit the story one wants to tell. It makes sense, though, because there are marketing executives and business plans to deal with in this case. Let’s just hope the finished product turns out as well as I hope it does.