Let's begin with a full disclosure: this is not only the first Telltale Sam & Max episode I've ever played, but also the first time I've played any Telltale adventure whatsoever. Don't leave just yet though, I want to flap a big, papery pile of adventure gaming credentials in your face to prove it's still my business to be reviewing Beyond The Alley Of The Dolls, the fourth episode of this latest season.

I've played through LucasArts' Sam & Max Hit The Road several times - once going so far as trying for a whole day to get the audio working on a modern-ish PC by fiddling around with some autoexec.bat nonsense. That proved utterly futile, but luckily ScummVM came along a couple of years later and made everything nice and simple again. Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, the Monkey Islands and the rest of the LucasArts classics have all crossed my hard-drive at one time or another. You may even have caught my Monkey Island 2 Special Edition review from last week (still a great game, some parts of the edition not so special.)

So what you're reading here (uh ... as well as a Sam & Max review, obviously) is an adventure game veteran's first taste of Telltale's modern take on the adventure genre. Here's my executive summary for anybody reading this while running briskly for a train: the new wave is rather good.

Happily, there's even a specific feature for layabouts like me who've jumped into the season over halfway through. Sam carries a clickable casebook which provides handy summaries of people, plot and psychic powers (belonging to Max - more on those later,) so it wasn't long before everything was relatively clear. Since Sam and Max always bring an element of the chaotic along with them, it didn't phase me too much to learn that the hyperkinetic rabbity thing is now also a powerful psychic rabbity thing. Nor that they'd been hanging out with a six foot tall talking cockroach (who's actually a pretty swell guy.)

Weirdness being accepted at face value was a major part of Hit The Road, so it was impressive to find that Telltale have recaptured that feel without descending into tiresome, forced randomness or anything too close to meriting the description 'zany.' Screwball maybe, but that's perfectly acceptable. Welcome, even.

Equally as important, the writing is up to the standards of Hit The Road - which means a terrific volume of gags and wordplay (which, as Sam dryly notes it in this episode, is 90% of the duo's repertoire.) The joke hit-rate was just a shade under Hit The Road's, but there were multiple laugh out loud moments as well as a plentiful amount of chuckles, and a smattering of respectful "I see what you did there" head nods. Several of the throwaway references are pretty highbrow too, which is something that should be applauded. Such is the density of gagitude, that even if there's something which falls a little flat or goes over your head, another line won't be far away.

The writing is aided by strong performances from the main cast, who do a fine job providing the necessary sharp delivery to give the lines life. This is an area where Beyond The Alley Of The Dolls legitimately improves upon older speech-based adventures, which sometimes hadn't quite figured out how to cue up lines to be delivered with the correct ... timing. Whoever did the casting also worked hard to avoid selecting anybody with particularly annoying vocal tones. Really, the only problem with either the voice acting or the writing is that, in certain scenes, automated lines appear to be repeated at random. If you're still trying to figure out a puzzle or keep returning to said scene, those lines can get old really fast - especially when the randomisation goes a bit awry and simply plays the same couple of lines over and over again.