The cast of “Oregon Trail”.

Look, ma, they made The Oregon Trail: The Generational-Touchstone Computer Game into The Oregon Trail: Quest for the West!: The Musical! It sure sounds like prime Fringe material — Snakebites! Buffalo hunting! Four-part harmonies! Audience interaction! — but somehow it doesn’t quite deliver on its delirious promise.

Maybe it’s because they don’t take it far enough. The show spends too much of its time on a light comedic storyline involving five pioneers: unstable leader Jebediah (John Bambery) and his religious sister Hope (Haley Greenstein), young and sweet Asdfjkl; (Brian Walters), and two characters named by the audience, who ended up, at my showing, being Macaulay Culkin (Jeff Smith), the dumb hunk, and Casey Anthony (Julie Congress), the one-eyed gun-nut. It’s possible that different decisions (my audience made Jebediah a Baltimore lamplighter instead of a banker, for instance, and had the pioneers float instead of ferry or ford the river) really do lead to a substantially different show where different characters live and die, but without any hint of the other possibilities, there’s no sense of “Dang, we could’ve seen it that way.” The same goes for the video game-like scoring system the show offers — narrator Max Schneller never explains the reasons for the points we earn and lose, so we just have to take it on faith that our second-place-of-all-time finish was tabulated and not predetermined.

The extremely professional New York cast sing well-crafted Broadway-style songs with blippy video game touches about their desire to Manifest their Destiny or how falling in love is like diphtheria (eight different people collaborated on the book/lyrics/music). It’s a good time, but perhaps too obscure in method and, oddly enough, formulaic in plot to really be a Fringe classic.

The Oregon Trail: Quest for the West! has two remaining performances, listed here. Tickets are available online.