Point and click adventures. They’ve been around for nearly two decades, and yet the formula for making a truly successful one remains elusive. For every genuine classic like The Secret of Monkey Island there’s a dozen dreadful ones; what should amount to a slowly unwinding narrative with a breadcrumb trail of clues and taxing yet rewarding puzzles often degenerates into a pixel-hunting exercise in frustration.

Last year’s little-played and best-forgotten Agon: The Lost Sword of Toledo was an object lesson in how not to produce a point and click adventure: loathsome characters, with a protagonist who insisted on simpering over every item that fell within range of your mouse, a tedious premise that involved endless flicking through old books, and irritating programming tics, like doors that wouldn’t open until the correct character had been spoken to the correct number of times. And don’t even get me started on the graphics, which looked like they had been thrown together in a hasty afternoon on an Acorn Archimedes and then burnt to CD.

Which brings me neatly on to Telltale Games, a studio which has spent the last few years making some of the best point and click games currently available – Sam & Max and Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People. Of course, the fact that Telltale has such outstanding genre pedigree (studio members previously worked on the classic Grim Fandango, as well as Monkey Island) accounts for much of their success, and their latest project, a series based on the Wallace and Gromit franchise, seems a natural fit; lovable characters, quirky humour and plenty of scope for ridiculous turns of fortune.

Like Telltale’s previous outings, Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Adventures are a series of download-only adventures split across four episodes. The first, Fright of the Bumblebees, sees the eccentric inventor on typically hapless form; in an attempt to fulfil a large order of honey for the local shopkeeper, he unwittingly unleashes a swarm of giant bees on his sleepy town. Unsurprisingly, it’s up to Gromit, Wallace’s long-suffering canine assistant, to wade in and sort everything out.

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