Masem’s Gaming Blog

Sam and Max Season Two is a continuation of the episodic series from Telltale Games with assistance from GameTap, bringing the misadventures of the detective canine and his hyperkinetic rabbity-thing partner as they work their way through five new cases.  While the series continues to deliver the humor and intelligent puzzle solving that Season One had, there’s not the same feel of overall connectiveness that was in the first game, and the three-act approach to each episode does start to get a bit tedious.

Review Helpfulness: (1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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Story: B+

Unlike the first “season”, the story in the five episodes of Season 2 don’t link together in the same fashion.  Elements are re-used, some items are set up in early episodes to be used in a later one, and there’s general closure, somewhat, of open plots, but there’s no over-arching conspiracy theory or the like that really connected the individual episodes together, despite each having their own built in story.  Played separately, that’s not a major problem, but when you plunk all 5 in row across them, it is obvious.  That said, this time, Sam and Max work the cases of finding why Santa has gone gun-crazy, why Bermuda Triangles are sucking everything of the street, investigating a hip goth vampire, searching for Bosco who has gone missing by T.H.E.M., and finally confronting Beelzebub and working through the bureaucracies of Hell.

Outside of the plot, the game is still genuinely funny with the humor you’d expect from the genre.  Many of the characters and changes from the first season carry over (such as Max being President), but the game is still enjoyable and solvable without having that knowledge - it just helps to make it better if you’ve played the first.

Gameplay: A

Pretty much the game plays as you’d expect a point-and-click adventure.  They have added a feature that allows you to double click to make Sam run to a point faster, though this doesn’t always seem to work, but still a welcome feature for some of the larger sections.

In terms of difficulty, I found a lot more of the puzzles to be devious.  Much of the fourth episode is centered around time travel, and though it’s not used to the extent that it was in Day of the Tentacle, it made a lot of puzzles a bit difficult to think through there, since you likely would need to figure out what to do in each time era to make sure to not create deliberate temporal anomalies. After figuring out many of the puzzles, however, I recognized that the game still drops the hints of what needs to be done via dialog and visuals, just enough to be annoying out of reach until you complete it and you get that moment of realization.  However, there wasn’t that many of the lateral thinking problems that Monkey Island was known for.  For example, one of my favorites in Escape from Monkey Island is recreating a recipe but while trying to avoid the literal meaning of the ingredients list.  There’s a couple like that in Season Two, but most were just a matter of either just thinking through logically or getting the right clues from people.  The puzzles are still a challenge, but I would like more variation there.

The season also suffers a bit in that most of the episodes are based a three act approach, which in itself is fine: it helps to fix points in the solution process so that mysteries and puzzles don’t last the entire game.  However, within the first and second acts, there’s still the fact that there are 3 or 4 independent puzzles that need to be solved to complete the act.  There are a few times that completing one puzzle was necessary to gain the key to the second one, but “interwoven” is not a word I’d used to describe these.  Obviously, a long linear set of puzzles is not good, and that can result if things are too interwoven, which means you spend the majority of the game clicking every inventory object on every object until something happens and then repeat again.  And the multiple puzzles do allow you to take a break from a difficult puzzle to work on another.  However, I felt there could have been more, or at least something to break the pattern of the obvious three-act work.  That may be the only fault of episodic gaming.  Compare this to, say, Escape from Monkey Island, and while there’s certainly similar points where you have three or four independent puzzles to solve at the time, the chapter lengths that bounded these problems all had various lengths, and thus a short chapter with maybe a simple linear solution pathway helped to break the flow.  With episodic games, you really can’t vary the length too much, else you end up making the consumer feel cheated.  However, if they did break from the three act approach for an episode or two, that may help in future seasons.

Value/Replayability: B

Each episode took me about three hours to complete, so with about 15 hrs of gaming, I can justify the cost of the Gametap subscription alone.  Assuming it will be released as a standalone series at some point as Season One was, I would still consider it a decent value.  Of course, like with all adventure games, nothing will change on repeated playthroughs, though if you’re like me and you pull out your old DOS Lucasarts games to play through just to read/listen to the humorous dialog, you’ll probably come back to this as well.

Graphics: A-

There’s nothing really wrong with the graphics: nothing has changed from the first, and the new characters and various environments are all what you’d expect from a cartoon-like world.  The only major flaw is that voice synching with lip movements isn’t yet perfected; no so much a problem with the minor characters, but easy to tell with Sam and Max.

Audio: A-

Voice work is pretty good; recurring characters bring back the same actors, and the new characters introduced are all pretty good.  I know I’ve read people that dislike the voices used for Sam and Max, but they do grow on you.  Music is generally a combination of reused background music (appropriately) and new tones for the newer locations.  While the first series did feature some catchy musical numbers, there’s a couple used here but “catchy” is not the word I’d use for that, which is a bit disappointing.

Overall: A-

Overall, Season Two doesn’t have the same snap and collective wholeness that the first season had, but it still a well done adventure game, keeping the Sam and Max humor throughout the game. The series still feels like there’s more legs to it, though it would be nice to see them break the three-act mold each episode is falling into.  However, in the lack of any other adventure game series out there, this definitely does a good job at filling that void.

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