I came kind of late to the PC gaming party, so although I had heard of Sam & Max, I had never actually spent any time with the games. As a result of that, the characters just kind of hung around in the back of my mind and were briefly brought back to the forefront by an announcement at E3 in 2006 that some new games in the series were being produced and distributed by GameTap. But, since my experiences with GameTap were less than extraordinary I kind of forgot about the series’s resurrection, even though I knew it was purchasable online. Months later and my local Best Buy has a copy of the complete ‘Season One’ collection for less than is available from the developers, and I suddenly remembered that I wanted to try it.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from the game, since I hadn’t so much seen any of the other games in action, I went in pretty well blind. Turns out that this game is kind of a throwback. It’s a point-and-click adventure game. They’ve kind of fallen out of style these days, so if you’re not familiar with the genre, I’ll try to explain. Using only the mouse, you click on things to make your character do or say things. What you have to do is find the right things to click on at the right times to move the story along. It sounds kind of boring on the surface, and I usually don’t get in to them too much, but I gave this one a chance.
The game is broken up into six ‘episodes’ that were released throughout 2007. The idea being that the game can be released in bite-size chunks throughout the year. Since they’re short they can be developed quickly, released relatively often, and purchased reasonably cheaply.
So the episodes themselves are each about the titular heroes, a giant dog and a rabbit-thing with an aggression problem, trying to solve a series of cases involving hypnosis. They do this through a unique style of private-eyeing (a.k.a. ‘Freelance Police’) which typically involves deduction, reasoning, wordplay, and large firearms. What you’re really doing is wandering around the game space pointing, clicking on things, occasionally picking up things, and then using things, all in an effort to find the correct combination of person, place, thing, and time to advance the plot.
You don’t play a game like this for the compelling gameplay, the complex puzzles, or the razor-sharp platforming elements. You play it to experience the dialog, to see the well-crafted story. Thankfully this game has that in spades. It’s reasonably entertaining, and voiced competently. It compels you to play just to see or hear what kind of things are going to happen next. It’s rarely what you expect, which definitely adds to the fun. The only complaint I can come up with is that occasionally it’s very unclear what to do next. Though I only got stuck about three times those three times really kind of sucked some of the fun out of the experience. Though, for this kind of game, it’s a lot better than I usually do. And I was able to see this game through to the end in about nine hours. I’d say that was definitely worth my $20.