Sam & Max Season Two

The saviour of the adventure game genre?

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Episodic gaming is one of those ideas that seems to have been around for an age without ever really catching on. Despite the emergence of digital downloads as a viable game distribution platform, and the increasing acceptance of downloadable content and micro payments to enhance existing games, there still seems to be reluctance by the industry to embrace this potentially lucrative concept.

There is however one notable exception, Telltale Games' have recently completed the second series of their Sam and Max episodic adventure game. Both series have looked at the idea of episodic gaming in much the same way as a TV show and provided small self-contained episodes that can be played individually rather than simply selling off a larger game one level at a time. It's an important distinction and one that has as many downsides as it does up.

Backing up a bit, older gamers will no doubt remember Sam and Max from their seminal debut in the classic 1993 LucasArts adventure Sam and Max Hit the Road, a game which saw the two freelance police animals journey across America in search of an escaped sasquatch. The game was a huge hit with Sam and Max's genuinely amusing brand of anarchic humour and mind bending puzzles proving one of the high points of an already impressive adventure game portfolio for LucasArts.

Fast forward a mere thirteen years to 2006 and Telltale Games (LucasArts having long ago given up on adventure games in favour of bleeding the Star Wars licence dry) release 'Culture Shock', the first episode in a series of six episodic Sam and Max adventures, to widespread critical and consumer acclaim.

Now, in 2008, as the second series of episodes draws to a close with the release of 'What's New Beelzebub' it's a good time to look back and reflect on how this series has done. While it's undoubtedly fair to say there's been an improvement there's also a growing sense that the novelty and nostalgia values are no longer shining quite so bright, allowing some of the cracks in the format to show through.

Don't get me wrong, they're still all great little games and more Sam and Max is never a bad thing, I'm just becoming less and less sure that the episodic nature of things is really working to the title's advantage. The main problem is that by making each episode largely self-contained the scale of the puzzles is limited to the size of each episode. This means you're never far away from items needed to solve puzzles and since you don't carry the contents of your inventory between episodes the chances are you'll always have a good idea of what needs to be used when simply because there's only so much stuff you can pick up over the course of one episode.

The routine of setting each episode around the same street, albeit with new remote locations for each episode, is also starting to grind now we've walked up and down it for nine episodes. While a TV program gets away with using the same location again and again the same doesn't really apply in an adventure game because exploring the environment itself is such a large part of the experience. This goes back to the distinction between episodes and levels I mentioned earlier; were this one big game broken down into chunks these problems would be easier to avoid.

The perennial problem adventure games face, that of the dreaded 'fetch quest' (search each location for item A to solve path blocking puzzle Z), is sadly a trap Sam and Max falls into all too often. Perhaps it's in the interests of keeping things simple for the less experienced gamer but it's a shame they couldn't have found a better balance, perhaps growing more cerebral over the course of the series.

It's easy to gripe though, Telltale do deserve a massive amount of praise for what they've achieved. Episodes arrive on time, are priced perfectly and taken on their own each is a fantastic way to spend a few hours if adventure games are your thing. The writing is constantly on the nose and the trademark off-the-wall humour can be laugh out loud funny at times. It was also pleasing to see that despite each one being stand-alone in nature there was still an overall plot for those who played all the way through, and the last episode did a good job of pulling it all together into a satisfying conclusion.

Looking back, the problem seems to be that Sam and Max series two is somehow less than the sum of its parts. Individually each episode is hard to fault; sure some are wittier than others and everyone will have their favourites, but you'd be hard pressed to find many better examples of adventure gaming released over the last couple of years. But still there's something not quite right when you take a step back and look at it all.

Aside from my reservations about the restrictions of the structure, Sam and Max is also a perfect example of why adventure games still feel like they're stuck in the past. In a modern world where game environments are becoming ever more interactive and immersive it's a little frustrating to find you can't always pick up or use everything you see around you. It's the modern equivalent of getting frustrated by text adventures because they didn't understand what you meant unless you used the exact words they were looking for. It would be nice to see adventure games pulled into the new generation with proper environmental physics and puzzles that make good use of them. There's also something to be said for allowing multiple solutions to situations, it's no fun hunting around for hours looking for the exact widget needed to open a door when you can see a perfectly good crowbar on a nearby tool bench for example.

I seem to have moaned my way through this review and yet I really did enjoy this second series of Sam and Max. My criticisms are largely based on wishing the leading light of the adventure game genre would take some risks now it's firmly re-established and try to push some boundaries rather than rely on the same gameplay conventions we've been fighting with for the past decade and a half plus. Having said that, Sam and Max remains one of the finest examples of that aged gameplay around and you'd be missing out if you didn't give it a try for yourself, just don't expect anything new.

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By Paul Newcombe