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Dialing up the weirdness to eleven, Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space (a remaster of a ports of Sam & Max Season 2, originally released on PC in 2008) takes the concept of the prior entries in the series and provides an even more bizarre spin on it, with cultural references galore that looks for more situational irony than it does traditional laughs.
It might just be a consequence of trying to keep the comedy adventure series from becoming stale, but by making the game so bizarre, the game’s point-and-click mechanics make far less logical sense, frustrating the player as you feel you the need to combine every possible object just to find the correct solution. As a result, the joy of solving the puzzles is not the same as it was in Sam & Max: Save the World, and is further compounded by a lacklustre cast of new characters, leaving the two protagonists to carry the load.
This isn’t to say that the story falls flat, but the cultural grabs feel like cheap pops that are either overly-cliched or outdated, and even similar banter between Sam and Max can feel repetitive from the 15+ hour adventures, especially if you play the remasters back-to-back.
It results in chapters 1-5 being as inconsistent as they are weird, and is almost as if the game wants to parody every single culturally-significant fictional character known to the western world, but most of the jokes surrounding them are surface-level and are more about subverting your expectation of the characters in their immediate introductions, and anything amusing that comes from the scenario seems to arise despite their inclusion.
When they are given enough time to develop, said cliches can become a decent member of the cast – such as the Frankenstein robot – but for the most part, the new characters aren’t given enough depth to connect with the oversized Dog and Rabbit, and due to that, those particular chapters don’t feel anything more than a grand set-up for the puzzles.
This isn’t true of all the chapters, however, as chapter 4 uses time travel and connects an interwoven story from previous chapters, unveiling reasons for seemingly unimportant actions, giving existing characters some backstory and making the overall plot richer.
Although difficult to solve, the puzzles are often well-constructed – both individually and as a concept for the entire chapter. Whether it is timing the firing of a cannon, to load up a toy plane that you then must drop appropriately on an enemy’s head or changing the body part of a Frankenstein robot in order to answer questions correctly in a dating contest, there is always an amusing mix, keeping you on toes throughout.
Essentially, this is the same gameplay format from Save the World, and while it is a good blueprint to work from, there are very few changes from its predecessor – limited to providing clues when you are stuck and better mechanics for minigames – and the gameplay itself is largely the same, wasting opportunities to extend amusing mechanics such as controlling building-high robots and a boxing minigame. Furthemore, the remaster – much like its predecessor – offers little that previous ports haven’t already, but despite this, it doesn’t lessen my appetite for a remastered version of Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse.
Sam & Max: Beyond Space and Time tries to be too clever for its own good, expecting the player to follow long-winded and sometimes-incomprehensible logic of its puzzles, and with its dated references and cliched characters, although this entry might still be enjoyable, it is one of the less memorable Sam and Max entries.
