The point-and-click genre should be an easy means of transferring the wordy world of the Homestar Runner to videogame form. It’s a genre that gives pre-eminence to the writing – and certainly this ensures that the cult internet animation’s gentle humour is represented uncontaminated. Here is the same odd assemblage of characters, with their quaint lexical surrealism and ironically infantile ambitions. Playing as luchador bully Strong Bad, your primary motive in the game is simply to give the pepper-potshaped Homestar a beating.

Unfortunately, Telltale Games has made a game that is painfully short on interaction. Strong Bad will happily describe the objects around him, but any more significant interaction is often limited to the one obscure instance that will advance the plot. It’s perhaps a hallmark of the point-and click adventure that such bottlenecks present themselves, but rarely do they begin with them.

In the days of LucasArts’ primacy in the genre, the games would bury you in items and present you with several clear avenues of investigation, multiple puzzles requiring your attention. Strong Bad’s Cool Game barely even deigns to tell you what your objectives are, much less encourages you to care about them. Some of the hints are even misleading: Strong Bad announces that he should try to talk to Homestar even when Homestar is nowhere to be found, but the plot-significant event is to examine a bush near Marzipan’s house.

Things pick up around the middle of the episode: objectives suddenly multiply, become clearer, more interesting, and the means of achieving them more coherent. But you wonder if players will have wanted to spend this amount of time loafing around the Homestar Runner universe, or whether their interaction with it is best limited to ten-minute bursts via their web-browser, perhaps while sinking a couple of Cool Ones.

4/10