The International House of Mojo

A nice review, but I've gotta say at this point in time people should have a pretty good idea of what Telltale is going for with their products, and based on that the whole hours/price ratio argument and general complaints about length and difficulty are starting to sound kind of ignorant. If it's recognized that Telltale's game feels "just like a Wallace and Gromit short," then they succeeded in accomplishing exactly what they set out to.

They set out to make a GAME out of the Wallace & Gromit franchise, let's not forget it.
God knows if I am a Telltale supporter, but something has begun to change since Strong Bad, you can't deny that.
I was perfectly fine with episodic gaming: the second half of Sam & Max Season One and the whole Season Two just nailed the perfect balance between immediacy and challenge. Masterpiece.
Starting from Strong Bad, something began not to feel right: great design ideas, good craft in audio & visuals, but the games were TOO light.
W&G is inflating the problem, with less replay value and only four episodes, which don't feel "beefier" as they announced.
We're not ditching the classy Telltale work altogether, but I think fans should point out a bad trend without being offensive, of course. And that's because we love them. ;-)

I honestly never saw any trend with regard to "beefiness" after Season 2. In terms of the difficulty, I was stuck way more throughout Strong Bad than I ever was with Sam & Max.

My thoughts exactly. Why are people still complaining about length? More importantly, why are they still pretending that they actually finish half of those overly long games they buy?

Did either of you actually read the review? Zaarin wasn't just saying "it was too short," he said "My problem with the episode's length also stems from the fact that this time we're getting four episodes for the same price as five Sam & Max episodes. I think the lack of a fifth episode should have been made up for in the length of the other episodes."

And he didn't just say "it feels like a Wallace and Gromit short" (and therefore it accomplished what it set out to do), he said: "It feels at times more like a typical Wallace & Gromit short, with a few puzzles thrown in to make it interactive" (as in, more of an interactive movie than a video-game).

What you just quoted is pretty much exactly what I was responding to.

How is that "ignorant" though? Even if TTG set out to use the time-to-price ratio they're currently putting in their games, it's still a valid complaint if the player feels less than satisfied by said ratio.

I haven't played the Wallace and Gromit games, so I wouldn't know how short or long the games are, but pretty much every review I've read has had issues with the length of them. (Particularly ep 2.)

I don't think Telltale is setting out to satisfy any particular time/dollar ratio so much they're saying, "We think these four episodes of Wallace & Gromit are worth $34.99." For me the "ignorance" comes into play when I see reviewers measuring the depth of the game by how much the puzzles stumped them. There is nothing "particular" about the length of The Last Resort by comparison to Fright of the Bumblebees or most of Telltale's other games. They've all been basically the same amount in terms of content, so it always feels weird when I see a reviewer praise/criticize a particular episode because they found it to be significantly longer/shorter than all previous efforts when that's never really been the case. When Out from Boneville came out and none of us knew what Telltale's vision was and could only assume that they were making graphic adventure games in the same vein as the old LEC ones, the much smaller scope and the focus on characters over brain-teasing were understandably a new approach for us to get used to, but after five years of Telltale doing the same thing I think people should be judging the games against what they're advertised to deliver on versus something else.

If someone genuinely has issues with the interactivity being too slight or lacking in substance, that's one thing and should be noted, but often after somebody makes that complaint, their suggestion for fixing it is to make the puzzles harder. That sort of undermines the notion that the person saying that has any idea what substance actually means.

You want a solid suggestion? :-P
Okay: how about getting rid of explicit "find-three-objects" lists? What if the player had to figure out which things he/she needs? The hint system would help the gamers who want the list right under their nose. The idea wouldn't change their design strategy too much, but you'd get an extra layer of "solving".

I wasn't specifically referring to Zaarin's review. I haven't read that yet (but I skimmed over it), it's just that all these other websites are actually complaining about length again.

So far it's a good episode. I am enjoying it as much as the last episode, maybe a little more than.