Written by Thomas G.J. Sharpe
I had briefly played the 2007 Sam and Max game by Telltale Games when it released, with all the appropriate eagerness of a rabid fan of Sam and Max Hit the Road and everything that creator Steve Purcell had a hand in. I bought Hit the Road in the US, in it’s full big-box, extra item-laden glory, at the height of the Lucasarts golden era. That game, with its full talkie CD-ROM treatment is a high point of the genre, to this day. The Devil’s Playhouse, as a part of the franchise that followed, has a nigh-on impossible job. This has been demonstrated for years after Monkey Island 1 and 2, where even the excellent Curse of Monkey Island, was burdened with the weight of nostalgia, historic success, and fan expectation. When I played through this post-Telltale remaster, I had to bat away much of this predictable and rather useless rose-tinted baggage. A team of ex-Telltale developers, under the moniker of Skunkape, have been breathing fresh life into this set of Sam and Max titles, that do a great job of capturing the essence of Purcell’s absurd creations.
These are
point and click adventure games of the generation spawned from Grim Fandango
(the poster child of the post-2D world). While even Hit the Road had
some 3D elements in it’s visuals, the whole way PnC could be played changed. Playhouse
has scenes to puzzle through that operate and utilise the 3D-ness of the
locations. The essential parts are there; inventory, dialogue options, and the
modern squishing of action-verb tables or radials into a more succinct action
prompt. There is a lovely comic-style feel to GUI and a charming little
illustration of Sam when choosing some dialogue points on a radial. A key twist
to this story is Max’s use of the Devil’s Toybox, which provide him with means
to use all sorts of strange powers. This fits right in with Max’s frenetic
weirdness, but in gameplay terms, keeps him much more engaged than previously.
While Sam is still our straight-er man (dog), Max is less of a prop this
way, or a means to deliver a psychopathic one-liner. Long and the short of Sam
and Max as a concept, if you’ve not encountered it before, is a banjo playing,
revolver wielding dog and an insane rabbit solve crimes in a bizarre
bastardisation of the United States (that really just seems like the real
United States a lot of the time).
After Sam
and Max Save the World and then Beyond Time and Space, The
Devil’s Playhouse appears to have some continuity, but not so much that I
couldn’t enjoy it having not played the others. The episodic structure of the
original Seasons is present, that feeds into the “case of…” detective
schtick, and neatly providing some way to pace and metre out the plot points.
As the scenarios are typically surreal and/or zany, they need to move fast.
Most parts of this move at a decent whack, despite most of the entertainment of
the thing being rooted in the classic point and click space of dialogue. There
are consistent and reliable laughs in The Devil’s Playhouse, which is a
relief given the IP. I didn’t expect to be amused this much. Often it was the
dialogue itself, with it being quick and piercing to a great degree. This may
lack the more scathing social satire of Purcell’s comics, there is enough of
the absurd, the violent, and the indiscriminate about it. The sensibilities of
both characters are dutifully flippant. They fight crime and cause more damage
than the villains, and this is just how it should be.
There are
memorable characters a plenty. My personal favourites were a set of talking
radio gadgets, Sal the security cockroach, and the tin can army of Maimtron
robots. The voice acting often hits the comedy mark instead of the lines
themselves, and these are enthusiastically performed. Even at times, there is
unexpected emotion and depth to what is inherently a very pulpy scenario. There
is also a stand-out apex of the episodes here in “They Stole Max’s Brain”
(“based on the similarly titled novel by Jane Austen” is one of the best lines
in the game), where the drama ramps up and things get dark. Sam is always the
best for me when he’s on tilt.
The
graphics look great compared to the original game (from a little glance at some
videos). The environments to have a slight sparse feel at times that does date
it. These are remasters that will hopefully make the games up to date enough to
smooth a modern audience into engaging. Subsequent Telltale games after these
ones notched up the visuals, design and scene setting each time until it became
the license hoover it did. I believe that these games will instantly be more
accessible to modern audiences than any 2D PnC, however old feeling some of it
is.
I will look
to play the first two collections of episodes at some point as these feel they
represent the true sequel to a beloved game of mine. You can feel the influence
of the Lucasart era, and not just because of the closeness of some designers
and writers, but just how well others have taken the characters and made them
work in new but faithful ways. This is a great success that doesn’t have the
baggage of a lot of the “cool” licenses that can get in the way of other
Telltale games for me, and Skunkape have buffed it up real nice. Bravo.
Overall 9/10
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