Sam & Max - Telltale Series Review

Point and click adventure games is a genre that had its golden age in the 90’s. Usually very puzzle oriented, these games varied from hilarious world saving predicaments to space adventures.  Don’t forget the always entertaining attempts of getting a pathetic guy laid. You could say there was something for everyone. The games were very story or character based and included more or less realistic logics for solving whatever the task was at hand. Sadly, as computers got more powerful and games went 3D, the genre started slowly fading away.

Some of the series, like Monkey Island and Broken Sword, tried to keep up with the new trend and transformed their games into a weird mix of running around in a 3D world and clicking on things every now and then. I, as an old school point and click fan, always felt like the developers ruined the series with these new “better looking” games. Personally I’ve always preferred the 2D cartoony feel.

Naturally, I was horrified when I found out that Telltales had decided to adopt a classic game, Sam & Max: Hit the Road, and make something new out of its heroes. Though, I had not tried the original, I had seen it played and knew that it was very much like all the other point and click pearls of its age; filled with mostly stupidly amazing jokes and very unlikely puzzle solving logics. Did Telltales manage to keep the spirit of the 90’s in the game genre that was pretty much the only good thing that happened during that decade?

Sam is a dog.

For a short introduction, Sam & Max are a freelance police detective duo consisting of a dog in a suit (Sam) and a sadistic bunny with razor sharp teeth (Max). They share their office with a pet fish named Mr. Spatula and a rat called Jimmy Two-Teeth. The office is located on the same street as Bosco’s Incovenience convenience store and Sybil’s office for…well, a lot of things. The whole series is pretty much based around this particular street, even though you get to visit other places such as the North Pole, Hell and even the Moon.

Max is a bunny.

Let’s see what Telltales is made out of and get our first impressions out of the way. Holy Hercule Poirot in a blood-soaked bathtub with a full set of dental records and a mud-caked work boot with two missing treads! If you like detectives, the intro song alone is enough to leave parts of your body moist. You get no start up menu, no options screen, no nothing but the intro song and the gameplay starting right after with our two heroes getting their assignment for the episode at hand. I like this.

IT’S A POINT AND CLICK! I’m amazed! Even though the graphics of the game are fully in 3D, you still only need your mouse hand to play this, leaving your left hand free to scratch whatever place needs it the most at any given time. Moving your mouse around the office, you’ll notice that as you hover over an object you can interact with some text that appears on the screen telling you what it is you’re currently pointing at. Very classic, just the way I like it. I can’t help but share the view of my teeth with the flies in my room as I grin in pleasure at the mere first feel of the game.

One of the very rare times you see this doggie get upset.

Moving on to the content! It’s really hard to tell much about the game(s) and not spoil anything. There are a total of three seasons, each containing 5-6 episodes, each episode being a separate game. All the episodes inside a season are connected to each other from mutual characters and the final plot twists of the season finales. Season one and two are also heavily linked to each other whereas the third is more of a complete separate story.

The characters and storylines are fantastically written. The dialogue between characters is filled with jokes, puns and references to celebrities, music and movies. Nothing, not even Santa, is sacred. If it fits the bill it will be made fun of. Even when Sam and Max are at the verge of death you will hear their stupidly hilarious puns that make you chuckle and cover your face in shame at the same time. You will also hear jokes so bad that even the characters notice it. Awkward silence will follow.

The animations are fluent. Even in 3D Telltales has managed to keep the characters’ cartoony feel. You don’t know what dancing is till you’ve seen Sam boogie down with some zombies in a vampire’s mansion!

These are not the dance moves mentioned above.

The controls are all point and click for the first two seasons. You get some hot keys for things like the menu and inventory screen, but that’s about it. You can also use a controller to play the game, which is something I didn’t even try. The third season changes the controls a lot though. It turns the game into what Monkey Island and Broken Sword did to their series. The new controls take some time getting used to but they work well enough. Still would have preferred the option to move by clicking though.

The music and voice acting in the games are fantastic. Big band music blasting in the background as you steer you mighty car, Desoto, over bagpipes on the streets of….whatever this city is. New York? The characters’ voice actors are not only good but the way they sound also fits really well to the mugs that they’re portrayed by.

Mustache makes everything better.

As fantastic as the games are, I still have some issues with them. The audio is impossible to balance out nicely. The level of the music varies so much that with the same settings it will go from barely audible to loud enough that you can barely hear the character speaking under it. Constantly fiddling around in the audio options is not fun. Also, the controls on the third season had me disappointed. Even at the last episode of the season, I still wasn’t comfortable with them. I guess the reason they did that was to make the game more appealing to console users, as gamepad controls were also included. The controls were obviously meant to be used on a controller, which made the keyboard and mouse combo feel very unfitting. Real shame.

Overall though, Telltale did a fantastic job with this. The control issues can easily be forgiven because as I said in the beginning of this review, these kinda games are very story and character based. I can highly recommend these games for anyone and everyone. If you like cartoons, jokes, puns, good music, detectives, dogs, bunnies, aliens or even Satan then this game is for you. Go get it and have some fun!