Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse Remastered review: The power of friendship... and corn dogs

There’s an odd sense of finality to Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse Remastered. When the title originally launched over a decade ago, Telltale Games would soon transition to a different style of game, leaving point and click adventures behind. Telltale’s pivot to IP-driven, dialogue choice-driven narratives backfired. Many studios have closed and thousands of jobs have vanished from the games industry in the meantime. Smaller games have become more important but have struggled to get off the ground more than ever. Skunkape Games rescuing the Sam & Max titles from the jaws of death and remastering them has felt almost defiant.

End of an era

But that road always had an end. These are re-releases, and The Devil’s Playhouse is the last one. Sam & Max was always a scrappy, outside the box IP that has endured in spite of its apparent unmarketability. A single LucasArts golden age cult classic and a canned sequel. A short cartoon series that barely lasted a lone season. A perpetually out of print comic strip series. The Telltale series itself was a revival nobody saw coming at the time. Here we are once again saying goodbye to the most wholesome pair of violent sociopaths to ever do it. And this goodbye somehow hits harder the second time around.

The first two seasons, Save the World and Beyond Time and Space, operated by similar playbooks. They were sets of miniature point and click adventures that were relatively self-contained and not really concerned with their place in the world. I love them of course, and while they aren’t quite as jaggedly deranged as the original LucasArts joint Hit the Road, have plenty of gags with permanent spots in my mind. The Devil’s Playhouse is different. It came from a more successful and ambitious Telltale, one that was gearing up to change the world with The Walking Dead. This season has weird gameplay gimmicks, a story that builds across each episode, and is profoundly aware that what it’s building up to is an ending.

You crack me up, little buddy

Yes, of course, the five episodes making up The Devil’s Playhouse are full of jokes, reality-bending cartoon nonsense, and an overall disrespect for normalcy. But the game also asks questions I never would’ve expected from a series like Sam & Max, as smart as I know it is. What does it mean for a Sam & Max game to end? What happens if you look at Sam and Max as characters with a relationship, one they’ve been taking for granted for decades? What happens when you ask those characters to confront the idea of losing each other? How do you ask a couple of cynical cartoon characters these kinds of questions in the first place, without compromising who they are and what this series has been to date?

Answering those questions here would ruin the purpose of playing these games of course. What I will say is it isn’t just the questions being asked that’s impressive. The folks at Telltale back in 2010 didn’t just ask, they got down in the dirt and found satisfying answers. They did the work and it paid off, all the while making jokes about cosmic horrors, grimy American diners, corn dogs, cockroaches, police accountability, and on and on. It’s a creative slam dunk in a way that’s all the more impressive considering these are inherited characters, although Steve Purcell’s art and contributions are certainly all over Telltale’s games as much as the LucasArts original. The ending is so absurdly full of emotion I almost cried, which is wild to say for a game that had just been making jokes about mole men and snot minutes earlier. That’s an accomplishment that can’t be understated.

Under the hood

This release isn’t all just about the original work. It’s one of the more impressive remastering efforts out there in games today. Skunkape Games has done a ton of work with this series, well beyond the obvious technical upgrades like widescreen resolutions and controller support. Changes have been made to colors, lighting, character models, audio, and more, all to bring life to Telltale’s Sam & Max that simply weren’t feasible at the time. That's back of the box stuff, but it’s all great and absolutely justifies coming back if you’ve played the originals. In my mind, the visual changes do a lot to build a bridge between the games and Steve Purcell’s art, which is awesome to see in motion.

There’s lots of little "quality of life" tinkering that’s nice to have as well, and makes bringing Telltale’s Sam & Max trilogy up to modern “standards” feel worthwhile. The hint system is especially nice, as not only can you toggle it off or adjust its frequency, it doesn’t just blatantly tell you what to do. And for games like this, with those old school adventure game puzzle solutions that sometimes don't follow normal human logic, hints are a godsend. One thing worth noting though, is if you’re playing on Switch, you’re trading portability for some compromises in both performance and visuals. Nothing about the Switch version is Earth-shattering or game-ruining, but if you want the full extent of the remaster upgrades, the trade-off is worth keeping in mind.

They simply don’t make games like this anymore, for the most part. To be fair Monkey Island totally came back, and there was an… attempt at a new Sam & Max game (in VR form, which went as well as it sounds). But adventure games in the pre-Walking Dead Telltale style, the sort of zombified fusion of LucasArts’s classic SCUMM system with modern (at the time) PC game conventions are long gone. Skunkape Games’ remasters of all three Sam & Max seasons are the best ways to go back and experience a point in history that still doesn’t feel real sometimes. This is technically a review for The Devil’s Playhouse, but I can’t insist strongly enough how crucial it is to play all three games and take them in as not just a whole work, but a moment in time that won’t easily be replaced. Snag Hit the Road too while you’re at it; it’s only like six bucks on Steam. Long live the Freelance Police!

Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse Remastered is available on August 14, 2024 for the PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. A Nintendo Switch code was provided by the publisher for review.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.