When Telltale Games collapsed in 2018, four developers stepped in to acquire the rights to Sam & Max. Skunkape Games, as they are known, set about rereleasing the Sam & Max series — three seasons each of which was originally released in episodic form, following the sitular dog detective and his lagomorph pal. Now the third and final season has been rereleased, asking once again: “if any one of us could unlock the power of the mind, would we use it to unlock the powers of the infinite… or would we use it to destroy?”
If you have played either of the two previous seasons — Sam & Max Save the World or Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space, you can very quickly guess which one plays out.
If you haven’t had the pleasure, Sam & Max are freelance police. Sam is a cool, calm and collected bipedal dog in a suit. Max is the embodiment of chaos, a hyperkinetic rabbity thing, and — naturally — the President of the US. The have relatively little regard for the law, and pretty much just stroll around performing an overly elaborate and complex set of point-and-click tasks in order to achieve their goals.
At the beginning of Chapter 1 of The Devil’s Playhouse, The Penal Zone, Max picks up a kid’s toy that allows him to see into the future. Little did he know that the Eyes of Yog Sogoth that he just grabbed would also unlock his psychic powers. As the game progresses, he picks up playing cards that grant mindreading, a telephone that transports them to another phone and a rhinoplasty toy that lets them shapeshift — all amusing little plays on what the item does for everyone else, and an insight into the playfulness of Sam & Max creator Steve Purcell’s brain.
The problem is that these Toys of Power are being sought by an evil and powerful space gorilla, General Skun-ka’pe. He lands on your street, tries to claim the toys and even steal Max’s brain so that he can wield the Toys of Power for himself.
What follows is a joyous campaign of puerile humour and anarchistic problem solving. Case in point: when Skun-ka’pe brags to his queen that after locking Sam and Max in an intergalactic prison and blowing it up with an antimatter bomb, “I took care of the Penal Zone in one stroke”. Max walks past and snidely comments on the unfortunate choice of words.
But all of this was true when the game was first released in 2010. So how does 2024’s remaster shape up?
The answer is incredibly well. As with the previous remasters, most of the changes are technical, bringing the graphics from 1024×768 4:3 to high-res 16:9. The lighting, lip sync and audio have all been drastically improved, with the audio in particular shining through. That said, it’s not all just higher resolutions. Character models have been tweaked, new credits and menus have been added and the whole thing feels a little more connected as a result, and closer to Steve Purcell’s original vision. We know this because Skunkape said they had Purcell’s input along the way.
On top of this, a ‘new’ Toy of Power that didn’t make it to the original PC version is now available in the Nutri-Specs, along with a bunch of more spoiler-y additions that we won’t go into.
There’s not really much to complain about here. The intros are still unskippable, and the run button feels like it’s in the wrong place – I still don’t understand why running isn’t the default. Beyond that, there’s minor gripes with trophies not popping on the PS5, but that’s not the end of the world.
