Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse – Remastered review

• Reviews by Richard Hoover
• Published:

Telltale’s Freelance Police get a final Skunkape makeover you’d be out of your mind to miss

After its first two episodic Sam & Max seasons, Telltale Games stepped back to focus on other properties for a couple of years. With a return to the franchise in 2010, they were able to fold in the advancements from the intervening games to make Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse the most technically advanced installment in the series. Now Skunkape Games has finished their remaster of the entire original trilogy by giving the third season its own shiny new edition. It may not be the best of the three, but the same classic comedy content is presented here in greater glory than ever before. With improved graphics and sound, the way a good remaster should be, all five episodes are bundled together for another round of entertaining madcap adventuring by everyone’s favourite dapper dog and hyperkinetic rabbity thing. 

By the time The Devil’s Playhouse came along, Telltale had twenty-five individual episodes from their various adventures in the can, including eleven from the previous Sam & Max seasons. While the different series had all been well-received, the episodes were starting to feel rather formulaic, so for the third season the developers looked to shake things up. From the very start of the first episode, Max was granted psychic powers and became a playable character for the first time, if only to the limited degree of selecting a power and a target to apply it to. Such abilities were based around a collection of psychically enhanced toys: a play phone to teleport to the person being called, a wad of rhinoplasty to capture pictures of objects that Max could transform into, a deck of playing cards granting telepathy, and so on.

No half measures here, the episodes went all in on these psychic powers. Admittedly, the powers changed up the gameplay a little, but such heavy focus on them tended to simplify many puzzles, particularly in the case of Max’s future vision and telepathy. While there are some clever uses of these abilities, mostly they both give you the answers to the puzzles and you then, more or less, mindlessly do or say what’s shown in these premonitions rather than having to figure things out for yourself. This is especially prevalent in the first installment, where future vision and teleportation are the only powers you really have to play with. While I applaud Telltale’s willingness to experiment, the psychic powers didn’t quite do it for me. Fortunately, there’s still a good dose of traditional inventory and dialog puzzles throughout the season, which require a bit more thought to solve.

In the first episode, "The Penal Zone," Max gains his powers by the simple expedient of touching a psychic toy thrown out in the trash. It may seem a little arbitrary, but Sam is talking to the police commissioner on the phone at the time it happens and says, “And Max has psychic powers now, apparently.” It’s a laugh-out-loud moment that justifies the absurdity of it all. Shortly thereafter, Sam & Max are introduced to one of the ongoing villains of the season, General Skun-ka'pe (from whom Skunkape Games take their name). A giant, talking space gorilla, the general is on a quest to find toys of psychic power and has come to Earth on his search. Naturally, it’s up to the Freelance Police to stop him. The episode begins with a tutorial, during which Max has more powers available to him than in the rest of the episode. Things get off to an awkward start with a weird flashback-within-a-flashback structure, but it’s worth it for the hilarity of Max psychically transforming into a bazooka. Once events catch up to real time, the story is easier to follow, but it does provide a bit of a bumpy introduction to the season, which improves episode over episode.

Episode two, "The Tomb of Sammun-Mak," is also rather discordant, but this time it’s an integral part of the story when Sam & Max discover a psychic film projector. Different reels of film represent different time periods in a tale centering on the detecting duo’s ancestors Sameth and Maximus. You will get to play these older incarnations of the characters themselves as they try to secure the Devil’s Toybox, a repository of psychic toys, from the nefarious Kris Kringle. Santa as a scheming monopolist isn’t the only humorous return of a past character, as this episode shows Sameth and Maximus’s role in creating the vampire Jurgen and a more significant and funny depiction of baby Amelia Earhart than her season two appearance. It’s necessary to essentially move forward and backward through time with the different film reels to find answers to some of the puzzles. Clever use of this mechanic makes this second episode one of the highlights of the season, as does seeing Sameth sporting a ye olden days moustache. 

The title of "They Stole Max’s Brain!" for the season's third entry says it all. Someone has removed Max’s noodle, plunging Sam into some coatless, hatless, rolled-up-sleeves film noir thuggery. Another standout of the season, it’s exciting to see how much Sam truly cares for his friend Max as he roughs up various informants to find who stole his little buddy’s brain. Particularly funny is seeing Sam pick up a rat by the scruff of the neck and flicking him on the nose to intimidate him. This episode actually feels like three separate parts in one. The tone changes on a dime when Sam’s investigation takes him to the natural history museum, where his anger dissipates and he resumes his usual shtick, and then once more when events return to Sam & Max’s normal haunts, now Egyptified by the revived pharaoh Sammun-Mak, who uses the toys of psychic power to rewrite the fabric of reality and have all of the game’s regulars worship him – except for Max’s literally disembodied brain in a jar. Now it’s up to Max – whose brain is fortunately portable and somehow still able to talk – to trick the alternate Sam into stopping the pharaoh. As an added bonus, Star Trek fans will get a kick out of the gladiatorial fight between Sam and General Skun-ka'pe that parodies the Kirk and Spock fight from the original series episode “Amok Time.”

Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse – Remastered

Genre:	Comedy, Mystery, Science Fiction
Presentation:	Realtime 3D
Theme:	Adaptation, Team-up
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Stylized
Gameplay:	Puzzle, Quest
Control:	Direct Control, Point-and-click
Game Length:	Long (more than 10 hours)
Difficulty:	High

With episode four, "Beyond the Alley of the Dolls," things take a turn for the weird. Like a horde of zombies, a wave of Sam clones sporting gold lamé boxers is storming the city. Their simple clone minds house only one thought: toys, toys, toys. Someone has sent them out, scouring the city for any and all psychic playthings. Sam (the authentic one) & Max have to find where the clones are coming from, which involves a trip through hidden mole caves, the strange existence of the mysterious Doctor Norrington, a rip in the fabric of reality, and the discovery of Girl Stinky’s new boyfriend. It’s an eclectic mix that evokes memories of some of the more random adventures from the Sam & Max comic books. What more needs to be said about an episode that culminates in a line of dancing Sam clones ascending the Statue of Liberty to sacrifice themselves?

Everything comes to a head in "The City That Dares Not Sleep." In the fifth and final chapter, the psychic powers have become too much for Max and have transformed him into a monstrous Cthulhu version of himself. Sam has to form a rescue party to travel inside Max in order to find a way to save him before his head explodes. More characters from past seasons appear, including Mister Featherly, Satan and a delightfully warped and memorable appearance by Sybil, carrying the soon-to-be-born child of the statue of Abraham Lincoln. Understandably, Max is largely absent for this episode, which is keenly felt throughout. Even so, floating spiritual Max heads waft around spouting off Max-type comments, so the offbeat lagomorph comments are not completely missing. With Max’s role so diminished, the psychic powers are far less prevalent here, making this episode, puzzle-wise, the most traditional of the season.

Beyond the gameplay changes the psychic powers brought, what was most apparent with season three compared to the two earlier seasons was the increase in production values. In the original release, the graphics had been given a bit of a visual upgrade, with higher polygon models, more detailed textures, more special effects, and fancier camera work. Not to be outdone, the audio too was raised to a slightly higher quality, with less noise from file compression. As such, the jump to this remastered version of The Devil’s Playhouse isn’t quite as pronounced as it was in the earlier two updates, but it is still noticeable and very much appreciated.

One change that I greatly welcomed, and was amused by, was the inclusion of a traditional point-and-click control scheme. For the original game, Telltale had already discarded point-and-click for Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures in favour of the more gamepad-friendly click-and-drag method. Adding point-and-click to the remaster made me chuckle, as back in 2010 there was quite the discussion on the Telltale forums with the developers, who were adamant that point-and-click could not work in the newer games that involved more dynamic camera movements. Skunkape has evidently found a way to allow point-and-click now, though there are a couple of scenes where you may have to resort to the keyboard or game controller for movement. One such place is in the local diner, where it is almost impossible to walk towards the camera to access a critical part of the room. Another occurs when the detecting duo get cursed and change into bas-relief sculptures plastered on the side of an Egyptian tomb wall, where they can only move left and right and point-and-click does not seem to be implemented at all. 

Beyond the simpler point-and-click control scheme, the interface for season three, to all appearances, remains identical to the earlier version. This includes the use of a cardboard box button that brings up an overlay of Sam’s inventory items. I much preferred the more streamlined, on-screen inventory of the first two seasons and found the change to the overlay inventory in the remasters to be rather cumbersome. It’s not so much here, but that’s more down to the lesser reliance on inventory items than any new improvement this remaster brings. One nice addition to season three, which was done for the previous remasters as well, is that now all five episodes can be played from within the same game instead of being distinctly separate applications.

While The Devil’s Playhouse has been tweaked here and there on the technical front, the content remains the same as the earlier release. Unlike the first season remaster, which had noticeable changes in this regard, particularly to the dialog, I can’t say I noticed any such differences with season three. They may exist, as I didn’t do a scene-by-scene comparison, but if so, they’re clearly not as overt as its predecessor. For my money, while season three is definitely funny, it’s not quite as sharp as the first two. That said, it has some of the most memorable sequences of the entire series across its fifteen hours of play time. Sam’s film noir stretch and the opportunity to play Sameth and Maximus in the past are the obvious highlights. Throw in Agent Superball’s ability to resist mind reading, the fever dream origins of Girl Stinky, a hilarious European tourist in episode three, Skunkape’s hapless minions, and, of course, the cutting of the cucumber lengthwise, and this season is another great comedy classic for Steve Purcell’s popular duo.

Final Verdict

The Devil’s Playhouse finishes Skunkape Games’ effort to remaster all three seasons of Telltale’s Sam & Max games, and it’s really nice to have them all so consistently executed now on the technical front. Doubly so when you go back to the original releases and see just how far the technology had come between the first episode of season one in 2006 and the final episode of the third season four years later. As season three was already the most technically proficient, the upgrades aren’t quite as significant, but completionists will absolutely want this latest remaster added to their collections, while newcomers could easily jump in here and find plenty to enjoy, albeit missing many of the amusing callbacks. Now that the team has finished restoring the games for modern hardware to complement the entertaining puzzle design and funny writing, clearly the next step is to move onto a brand spanking new season four! (I hope, I hope!) While we’re waiting for that – if it ever happens – it’s the perfect time to dive (back) into Sam & Max to play their entire episodic catalogue at a level of production quality we could only dream of in the early 2000s.

Richard played Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse – Remastered on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.

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