Bone: The Great Cow Race First Look

Last year, the adventure-game veterans at Telltale Games hit the market with their first original project as a new studio, Bone: Out From Boneville. Now the small company is hard at work finalizing the next episodic installment in the series, The Great Cow Race, and we got a chance to look at a nearly finished version of the game recently. As you'd expect, the game picks up the further adventures of cousins Fone, Phony, and Smiley Bone, and the storyline is based on that of the second book in Jeff Smith's popular graphic novel series.

Telltale reps told us that the first Bone game was designed to appeal to a mass audience, but with the sequel, the designers have swung the pendulum back a bit, more toward the hardcore adventure-gaming set. On the gameplay side, the basic mechanics are still the same, but the designers have made a number of additions that should make The Great Cow Race a more engrossing adventure experience. For one thing, there's just more to click on. You can "look" at more environmental elements (eliciting a description), interact with various objects (such as tasting a bowl of soup in a restaurant), and generally get more hands-on with your surroundings. The Great Cow Race purportedly will also feature deeper puzzles than the first game, which sometimes simply had you navigating your way through a dialogue tree in order to progress. Finally, Telltale says the new game will be longer than the first, which was of a fairly modest length--but then, we'll have to check out the final game before we can verify that claim for sure.

One new puzzle in particular that we saw during our demo struck us as highly original. During this sequence, Fone Bone wanted to send a poem to the lovely Thorne expressing his affection for her, and it was up to the player to compose the verses that would win Thorne's love. To do this, the player was presented with a Mad Libs-style interface whereby certain nouns could be plugged into a short template to create a finished poem. The only problem was, Fone's initial ideas all related to Moby Dick--and any guy who's ever tried to woo his potential lady love through the fine art of poetry should know that referring to her as a great whale is not the soundest strategy. The solution? Explore the environment to find more ideas for your rhymes. Probably better to compare her eyes to blueberries than harpoons, right?

Another big change is the ability to switch between all three Bone cousins at will. The original game dictated which character you played as at a given time, but in the sequel, you'll often have access to all three at once. This doesn't mean you can take any character into any situation, but at some junctures you'll be required to solve puzzles in different locations as different characters to progress the storyline. Telltale reps told us these disparate puzzles will be tailored to each character's personality, to make the flow of the gameplay and the storyline feel more natural and accurate to the books.

The first Bone game was peppered with action minigames that were meant to break up the adventuring, though the more hardcore adventure-game fans apparently would have preferred to stick to the puzzle-solving at the expense of the frantic mouse-clicking. In order to please the diehards, Telltale has scaled back the involvement of the minigames in The Great Cow Race. There will still be some in there, but they won't be quite as demanding as the first time around. For instance, we saw a game that involved--what else--a cow race, in which the player had to keep his or her character from falling off the back of one of the cows in the race, but without demanding the same sort of mousing dexterity that the minigames in Out From Boneville did.

The first Bone game's system requirements were incredibly modest--the game would run on a GeForce 2 card, which is positively ancient by PC hardware standards. The Great Cow Race will ask for a slightly beefier system, but just barely. You'll want at least a GeForce 3-level card to play the new game, and since much better cards are available for a relative pittance, just about anyone with a functional machine should be able to enjoy the game. The Great Cow Race is stylistically very similar to Out From Boneville, though it seemed to us that the detail level in the characters and especially the environments has been raised a bit.

Telltale just recently announced an April release date for The Great Cow Race, and in addition to the downloadable version of the game, a CD edition will be available for order direct from Telltale for a nominal premium. This CD version will reportedly contain some extra content, such as video clips and trailers, though the specifics haven't been announced yet. Look for more on The Great Cow Race and further Bone games in future updates.