Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse Episode 2 Review

20 May 2010 at 13:09:06 by Tim McDonald
Systems used to review this title: (PC)

Say what you will about its games: Telltale can take criticism. No, really, do say what you will about its games, because Telltale can take criticism, and that's become increasingly apparent of late. Tales of Monkey Island showed this well with a minimal amount of location repetition and a plot that actually tied the episodes together, not to mention improvements made to characters and puzzles, and Sam & Max's third season looks to be going the same way.

The Tomb of Sammun-Mak, as the second episode of this third season is called, showcases this nicely. It picks up exactly where the first episode left off, with the titular duo discovering a grisly tableau in their basement along with a video projector and four reels of film. The video projector once more triggers Max's latent psychic powers, giving the pair control over the events of the film – a film which depicts their ancestors, Sameth and Maximus, attempting to recover The Devil's Toybox from the Tomb of Sammun-Mak in Egypt.

While it's hard to ascertain how much these events will tie into the overarching season on the whole it gives Telltale a great excuse to play around with the traditional adventuring structure, while simultaneously introducing a battery of new locations. You can hop between reels at will, and while this doesn't tie into too many puzzles – there are only one or two that require you to fast-forward through to later events in order to find out information you can use in the past – it does mean that most of the time you're free to try and progress in another reel if you're stuck on the one you're on.

And you will get stuck. While this episode won't take too long to finish (if you're an average adventure gamer, it'll clock in at around four hours) it does have a couple of serious sticking points, with one puzzle in particular having very little in the way of any real clues. In hindsight, it seems fairly obvious, but unless you notice a very minor visual detail that's never voiced, you might have a few issues. Thankfully, the hint system is somewhat improved: while Sameth's occasional mutterings aren't going to cause a sudden flash realisation or make you feel cheated out of solving a puzzle for yourself, they do a good job of letting you know which puzzle you should be working on to try and make progress. This is, for better or worse, the first time I've felt that the system was both useful and unobtrusive.

This narrative structure also lets Telltale take a few cues from earlier LucasArts titles. As the tale is essentially told in flashback, death is now actually possible in a few rare circumstances, which leads to the game cutting back to Sam and Max who comment that it probably didn't turn out like that. Cutting back to the pair also allows for some Mystery Science Theater-style commentary on what they've just witnessed, although this is disappointingly underused. Considering that their ancestors are essentially replicas of them, though, it's maybe for the best.

Sameth and Maximus meet a cast of characters that's at one familiar and new. Baby Amelia Earhart makes a welcome return, while there are a whole tribe of mysterious mole-people from Egypt and a familiar-looking Eurotrash type with a mortal fear of vampires. The locations are most definitely new, though, with the Disorient Express – which provides travel to and from Egypt – the setting of a Christie-like mystery, when an item goes missing and the ancestral duo need to work out whodunnit. The titular tomb, too, has a few excellent moments, particularly those revolving around finding sadistic uses for the curses of the mole-people.

But once again it's the psychic powers that steal the show, with Maximus possessing the same toy-based abilities that Max acquired in the first episode. Barring the ability to get out of the film to swap reels, you'll primarily be using a can of nuts which Sameth and Maximus can shrink into and a ventriloquist's dummy that lets Sameth speak out of anything – or anyone – in the environment. The latter is the most amusing, particularly when needlessly (ab)used on every character you can see, and while the majority of the puzzles revolving around it are fairly obvious it's always fun to pull it out again.

All of this combines to make The Tomb of Sammun-Mak a really good episode. There's a great mix of comedy and some wonderful puzzles, despite one or two sticking points, and the sense of catharsis and elation when solving some of the puzzles that require outside-the-box thinking is unmatched in most of the other, recent Telltale games. Again, it's uncertain as to how much of this episode will tie into the story that's yet to come and thus what impact it'll have on the season as whole, but it's enjoyable enough by itself that anyone who's played the first should definitely pick it up.

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