A Promising Start To Season Three
In the buildup to the third season of Telltale’s and Steve Purcell’s Sam & Max, I wondered what the focus of this season’s satire would be. Season one, retroactively titled Sam & Max Save the World for the Wii and Xbox 360 release, satirised the media and how people are so quick to buy into fads, like they’ve been hypnotised or something. Season two, Sam & Max Through Time and Space, took aim at generally believed fictions, such as Santa Claus, Vampires, UFOs and so on, alongside religious beliefs and imagery like Hell.
Season three on the other hand, entitled The Devil’s Playhouse, seems to be looking at 70s and 80s B movies, paying a homage to their pleasing dreadfulness rather than making fun of them. All the signs pointed to this: the Sam & Max Season Three website is set up like the outside of a theatre, and the titles of each episodes evoke memories of the few bad movie nights I’ve had in the last few months.
However, it wasn’t until I got to playing the first episode, The Penal Zone, that it really clicked. It opens on the spaceship of General Skun’kape, who is attacking New York City, blowing up retro-styled cars and spitfire-like planes with his giant lasers, whilst our heroes are trapped in a cage, unable to stop him. Max has unexplained abilities (all relating to certain toys enabling different powers) whilst Sam has to think of a way to reach his gun and stop the general. The scenario, script and aesthetic is all awfully delightful, complete with the typical dark and bizarre humour that Sam & Max is infamous for. In fact, I’m half tempted to say that from first impressions, the homage works better than a straightforward satire; it catches Sam and Max in their element far better than the other two seasons ever did.
So I’m pleased to say that the first episode of Sam & Max The Devil’s Playhouse is a great start. The series has always been known for being funny and having strong writing; The Penal Zone builds on that strength and takes the series to the same level of greatness that Telltale’s last series, Tales of Monkey Island, had managed to reach.
The new approach in writing has also led to some very interesting new gameplay mechanics (or was that the other way around?); Max has new powers which you can utilise to solve puzzles. Future sight, allowing Max to see the future, teleportation, and shape shifting are just some of the new features on offer. They shook things up in a series (and genre as a whole) which is largely criticised for gameplay that hasn’t changed much since the late 90s, though mostly at the expense of traditional puzzle solving.
In this episode I appreciate that it’s a new feature that they want to make the most of, but I fear that if they overuse it in future episodes, again at the expense of traditional adventure gameplay, it will start to feel gimmicky and simplistic against tried and tested staple puzzles. Going forward, I hope they strike a nice balance between the new and the old, which will hopefully allow some of the difficulty to return.
My biggest gripe with The Penal Zone was that the puzzles were incredibly simplistic, and the future sight gameplay mechanic let me solve puzzles far faster than I had a chance to even think about them. So much so, the episode was already over just as I was starting to thoroughly enjoy it. A suggestion for any future Telltale series would be to add difficulty settings to the games, ala Monkey Island 2. Though I appreciate the size of the episodes and their relatively small budgets compared to bigger games may prevent this. Still, it would be nice for those of us who are veteran adventure gamers to be able to have a harder time solving these puzzles. The hint system would be a great compromise if the puzzles weren’t so easy, but with the current level of difficulty they really don’t serve any purpose.
Besides plot and puzzles taking on a new form in this season, the controls also get an overhaul, bringing them up to the same standards that Tales of Monkey Island had, which in turn built upon what they had done in the Wallace and Gromit games. Gone is the point & click interface that the first two seasons had, instead replaced either by mouse-only controls (clicking and holding to literally drag Sam around the environments) or my much preferred W, A, S and D directional controls working in harmony with the cursor to select items and menus. The controls are definitely consolised, considering the previous two point & click seasons played horribly on the Xbox 360, but it disappoints me that Telltale’s primary control system seems to be more catered to iPad and PS3 users rather than their core PC and Mac audience. I’m just glad they offer us tight directional controls with the keyboard that give us a constant stream of activity and sense of control, as opposed to the tedious point & click options, which forced us to wait (sometimes impatiently clicking the mouse button over and over) to reach our destination.
Overall, though, the first episode of The Devil’s Playhouse is a promising start to what is hopefully Telltale’s best series yet. In future episodes I’d like to see a cameo of some older characters (in particular Bosco, who I missed dearly in this opener), but also to see Sam and Max move away from the traditional locations in the game, and go somewhere totally new. Having spent the last two seasons exploring the streets surrounding the duo’s office, I’m ready to see other places. And if the trailer for episode two, The Tomb of Summun-Mak, is anything to go by, Telltale will be making good on that wish.
