Telltale Games is one of my favorite studios. Though the studio has gone through a lot in recent years, including closing and re-opening, their back catalog of games has some of the best narratives in all of gaming. Before The Walking Dead, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Games of Thrones, however, Telltale was best known for their work on the Sam & Max series.
I’ve always wanted to go back and play them, and now, with Sam & Max Save the World Remastered on PS4 from Skunkape Games, I can finally experience a modern version of this all-time classic. Does it hold up after all these years? Let’s find out!
Laying the Foundation for an All-Time Classic
Sam & Max Save the World Remastered combines all six episodes of the first season into a single package on PS4. Each episode has been faithfully restored and ported to console controllers for a modern audience. You’ll spend about two hours per episode, each of which tells a standalone story that subtly ties into a larger narrative over the course of the season.
In this first episode of the season, we’re introduced to Sam and Max for the first time. We find out they’re “freelance police.” It’s been a while since they’ve had a new case. The story gets moving when they receive a call from the Commissioner asking them to look into strange reports regarding three washed-up child stars called the Soda Poppers.
It turns out they’re peddling a new self-help video called “Eye-Bo,” and what’s worse, the videos seem to hypnotize anyone who watches them! It’s a whacky premise, but it immediately throws you into the life of these iconic duos.
You’ll start in their office, and from the beginning, you’ll notice that there is much to see and do in any given environment. From investigating various trinkets and items around the office to dialogue options with Max and a rat named Jimmy Two-Teeth, who lives in your walls, the game never lacks options for interactivity and world-building.
Like any classic point-and-click adventure, Sam & Max is a series that focuses on a combination of dialogue choices and puzzle-solving to progress. Many interactive items are optional, but certain ones can be added to your inventory and used with others.
This first episode throws you into everything, and it’s here where you’ll need to get familiar with the overall logic of the puzzles and the whacky jokes the game will throw at you. You also get to meet some staple characters like Sybil and Bosco, who are both present in all six of the season’s episodes.
From a story perspective, the first episode lays the groundwork, but you can tell it’s doing a lot of heavy lifting in introducing everyone and setting the stage for the rest of the season. It’s a strong first impression, but it can come across as a little scatterbrained due to covering all these bases in a two-hour span.
The second episode of the season, “Situation: Comedy,” focuses on a new location within a TV studio. You’ll move between multiple sets and solve puzzles that span everything from a sitcom to a singing competition to a talk show. Mainstays like Sybil and Bosco still come up a few times, but this episode seemed to swing the other direction towards focusing too much on the standalone narrative.
As a result, we don’t get much progression regarding the season’s overarching plot. Even so, I enjoyed that the second episode has us primarily navigating the TV studio with minimal backtracking or loading screens traveling between the main office area and the secondary location.
Episode three, “The Mole, the Mob, and the Meatball,” is my favorite of the season. Not only does the humor come into its own here, but the puzzles are just the right balance of inventive and esoteric. The setting within Ted E. Bear’s Mafia-Free Playland and Casino perfectly encapsulates the absurdity of the Sam & Max universe while also allowing for a strong connection to the broader story of the season.
Moving into episode four, “Abe Lincoln Must Die,” you can tell the writing team found its footing in the jokes and the storytelling. Episodes 1 and 2 walked so the remainder of the season could run. Ongoing threads start coming together more significantly in this episode. While it had more backtracking between the two locations than I would have liked, I enjoyed seeing continued payoff from the ongoing stories surrounding the Soda Poppers, Sybil, Bosco, and Jimmy Two-Teeth.
Episode five, “Reality 2.0,” takes a hard turn into strange territory, even for Sam & Max thus far. The episode’s story seems almost entirely disconnected from the larger plot, with only a few loose connections at best. That’s not to say it’s bad; I enjoyed the new mechanics and the unique gameplay twists to this episode, but in the grand scheme of things, it felt like a side story.
The season finale, “Bright Side of the Moon” brings together all the threads we’ve been following and finally reveals the big bad behind everything. It feels appropriately grand in scale, and the final string of puzzles certainly conveys urgency. Still, I do feel like the series could have benefited form more foreshadowing and possibly an earlier reveal of who the ultimate villain was. Some of the final story beats felt a little rushed when they could have been sprinkled into earlier episodes.
Like any point-and-click adventure from this gaming era, the puzzles will be a mixture of simple, complex, and plain crazy. Most of the time, you’ll be able to follow along if you’re listening carefully to the dialogue, but there will be a few puzzles that I know will have people scratching their heads on what item to use, where, or on who.
Overall, the episodes in season one of this classic series follow a nice arc. Despite some distractions in the penultimate episode, I enjoyed each one based on its merits. I think the overall story could have been stronger. Still, I’m very excited to see if the writing and story continue to gain confidence and quality in the upcoming seasons, for which I will publish reviews soon!
Sensible Controls and Faithful Presentation
Shifting our focus to the presentation and controls, Sam & Max Save the World Remastered feels like an incredibly faithful remaster. The graphics are colorful and crisp, the performance is rock-solid, and the controls are (for the most part) tailored very well to the controller.
In particular, I like the ability to highlight all the interactive objects with the L1 button and snap between them with the right stick beats using a slow cursor any day of the week. You’ll still need to do some awkward cursor movement with the right stick during minigames and shooting sections, but these were never long enough to hurt my enjoyment.
The soundtrack is also another standout element of the presentation here. The Jazzy opening theme for each episode gives me flashbacks to watching Cowboy Bebop back in the day, and that’s one of my favorite soundtracks of all time. In every scene, the upbeat tracks perfectly, a mixture of silliness and a film noir.
Sam & Max Save the World Remastered is a no-brainer for fans of classic point-and-click adventures. Some of the early episodes (and the fifth one) don’t quite hit the same highs as episode 3, but as a package, it’s a faithful remastered and a potent source of nostalgia.
I’m excited to experience the second and third-season remasters and see how they evolve the writing formula. Still, for now, I can recommend the first season, and I hope you’ll join me as I review seasons two and three!
Final Score: 8.0/10
Review code provided by the publisher
Article by – Bradley Ramsey
Insert date – 8/21/2024