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With The Devil’s Playhouse, it feels to me like Sam & Max, the series, is becoming like Sam & Max, the characters. The series was originally a comic but broke into the video game scene in the 90s, thanks to LucasArts. It was a point’n’click adventure that broke the mold by inflicting the horrific violence on characters other than the protagonists. It was then picked up by the late Telltale Games. From that point on, Sam & Max have randomly crashed into my Steam account, spreading insane puzzles and violent comedy to every corner.
It’s a series that’s found its niche and has comfortably burrowed into that niche. Telltale produced three series of these games, with The Devil’s Playhouse being the third. Originally released in 2010, it was given a lick of polish and released back on Steam this year. If you’ve played any of the previous Telltale titles, you’ll pretty much know what to expect. Hundreds of funny voice lines paired to a slew of point’n’click puzzles that often make you roll your eyes. There are five episodes here, so let’s dissect each one in turn, shall we?
The Boys Are Back In Town
Episode 1
A giant space ape, Skun’ka’pe, descends on New York City, claiming that he’s looking for a set of psychic toys. Sam and Max don’t take the giant, purple ape at his word and set out to foil him. By using a toy phone and some playdough, among other things. Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse’s opener shows that the humour is still intact. Sam, the dog, is the straight man. Dry, cynical, prone to hyper violence. Max, the, uh, bunny thing, is the fool. Chaotic, insane, prone to hyper violence. It’s a duo that works well. Their nearly forty years of popularity proves that.
Episode 2
The pair find a magical projector and review their ancestors’ recovery of ‘The Devil’s Toybox’. This is the most interesting episode, mechanically, as we can skip between different ‘reels’ – sections of time. Items can’t travel, but information can. I feel like the puzzles rely a bit too much on wading through dialogue trees to trigger certain flags, then trapsing back and forth – especially the train sections. When it goes back to the point’n’click, inventory management route, it feels a lot more satisfying. Still, the puzzles aid the humour well. The solutions are as nuts as the characters.
Episode 3
Case in point, this episode features a puzzle where Max turns into a credit card, destroys a corndog tower, which causes credit cards to be outlawed, allowing Sam to win a badge he needs in a gambling game with three rats. It’s great. Oh, and Max’s brain has been stolen and the city overtaken by an ancient pharaoh. No biggie. The toys are worth considering. Max has a set at his disposal, which give powers like teleporting, transforming or mind reading. They form the backbone of many puzzles. They do have some catharsis to them, especially in the episode finales, but at times it feels like The Devil’s Playhouse is just doing the heavy puzzle lifting for me.
Little Sam in Big Max
Episode 4
Hordes of nearly-naked Sam clones – Samulacra or Dogglegangers as they’re known – descend on the Big Apple, and the duo have to track down the mastermind behind it. Spoiler alert: it’s not the cthulhu-looking chap sticking out of that guy’s chest. As hard as that is to believe. Anyway, let’s talk graphics. This is where Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse has had the most polish. It now only somewhat looks like lumpy playdough. It’s not a bad art style, really, it just looks a little uninspired. Borderline straight-to-DVD at times. Maybe I just miss the original SCUMM-era graphics.
Episode 5
The final episode brings it to a slightly icky conclusion. Max turns into a giant monster and begins terrorising the city, and the only way to stop him is to turn our car into a giant corn dog and have him swallow us whole. Turns out his insides are relatively well furnished. It’s a nice final episode that highlights how The Devil’s Playhouse tries to shake things up in each episode. In this case, we can stomp around the overworld as Max and, at one point, take control of Sam clones. These little elements are brief, but they’re welcome attempts to spice things up.
To wrap up my thoughts, I’ll say that my feelings on Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse are positive, overall. It got a good few chuckles out of me – even if a few too many jokes were just callbacks to earlier games – and some of the puzzles made me feel smart. Especially as the hint system is rather naff. I feel like the episode format hurts things a bit though. Each is quite short, meaning you’ve only got a handful of items at any time and that’s when the toys aren’t taking their jobs. In short, the humour does a fair bit of heavy lifting, but the gameplay is entertaining enough to have charm of its own.
Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse – Cozy, Funny, Limited
It does make me wonder if following the standard template was doing Sam & Max any favours, though. I suppose the fact that Telltale went out of business is an indicator, but the whole concept feels a little overdone at this point. Where other games might have included more in-depth puzzles or mini-games, Sam & Max handwaves them away with a joke – usually just overriding them with a single item or psychic power. Funny at first, but left me feeling a little shortchanged at the end.
Then again, like I said at the start of this review, Sam & Max is just something that crashes into my Steam account every now and then. I just get the itch to play it. The video game equivalent of raiding the fridge at midnight for a snack. When you do, you always get what you’re looking for: a ton of hilarious lines and a set of nonsense puzzles, that are just enough to keep the ball rolling. Can’t ask for more than that, really.
