For a few years I worked as a 2D artist for HOPA games (Hidden Object Puzzle Adventures). Good times :)

Iron Danger is out! Here are the two key arts I painted for the game. It was great to get to work on such a unique mechanic and fascinating world. You can find the game on steam and give it a try! Hope you’ll love it.

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https://store.steampowered.com/app/899310/Iron_Danger/

4cr Plays - Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space (Switch)

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Sam & Max series - point & click adventure games about a canine detective and his best pal, a megalomaniacal rabbity thing. I played the original, part of the legendary LucasArts lineup of the 90s, over and over again. Then, when Telltale Games brought back the duo as the stars of three “seasons” of episodic games, the episodes became part of a ritual where my future wife and I would sit around a CRT computer screen on Friday nights and play through them. I have really fond memories of playing each episode as they came out.

After Telltale closed down a couple of years back, a group of former developers - under the banner of Skunkape Games - bought the rights to the original games. These developers have been working to release all three seasons on modern systems, with a huge range of improvements to the controls, graphics, and audio. The remastered first season, Sam & Max Save the World, was release last winter - where it made the first winter of lockdown a tiny bit more bearable.

Now, one year later, the second season - Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space - has been released on PC, Xbox, and Switch. I have spent some time with the Switch release. Read on for my impressions.

Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space is a “point and click” adventure game. What this means, essentially, is that you progress through a story by solving puzzles embedded in an environment that you explore. That is - you point at things on the screen and click on them to interact with them. Your character has an inventory of items, and can use those items as part of manipulating your environment to progress.

In this type of game, the puzzles are the core focus of the gameplay. Timing isn’t particularly precise or important, and you don’t need to memorize button combos. Instead, the goal is to get you to stop and think - to reason using the tools at your disposal. One of my favorite examples of the type of puzzles and logic in this genre comes from the first season of Sam & Max. Early in the game, a rat in your office has stolen your phone and won’t return it until you offer up Swiss cheese. Max has filled the closet with cheese. This would be great, except that it isn’t Swiss cheese. Fortunately, your inventory holds the solution - Sam’s revolver! Swiss cheese has holes, a gun can make holes, perfect! You need to think a little outside of the box, and put on your Looney Tunes brain. However, if you can get into the right mindset, the solutions tend to click into place.

The story of Sam & Max revolves around the titular duo of "freelance police" - self-deputized crimefighters dedicated to solving mysteries and filling their wallets with sweet, sweet cash. Sam is a dog in a trench coat, and Max is a long-eared psychopath. Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space is presented as a season of six episodes, much like a TV show. Initially, each tells its own short story. Our detectives face off against Santa Claus, investigate a giant volcano, and meet a sketchy vampire. However, each case begins to tie together, before concluding in the dramatic season finale.

As you can imagine from that description, Sam & Max is fully tongue-in-cheek - a surreal comedy that blends a bit of Looney Tunes, a bit of Calvin and Hobbes, and a touch of Far Side. It is a world where animals and humans freely interact and it isn’t particularly weird to shoot the cheese with a gun. It is delightfully hilarious. Even today, I feel compelled to click on every single item just to see how it was described and every single dialogue option. Few games have comedy writing this sharp and hilarious, and this game is worth experiencing just for the script.

Each episode lasts about an hour and a half to two hours. Back in 2007, one episode was released every 1-2 months. As a result, it was a pretty novel way to play a game. Rather than it being your focus over a week or two, you would play it in these bite-size chunks. For many games, this kind of format doesn’t make much sense. However, here, it worked well. It created a unique pace, and kept the game from becoming boring or overstaying its welcome. As I mentioned, I used to have a bit of a ritual with Telltale’s games, where I would play through a new episode on a Friday evening with my girlfriend (and future wife) around the old computer.

The remaster presents you with all of the episodes at once, so you don’t have to space each episode out. However, I absolutely recommend that you do. It’s a different and refreshing pace compared to games that you just binge. You don’t need to wait a month between episodes, but it was fun to play an episode every week or so in the remaster.

If you played this season of Sam & Max back in the day - and your brain actually functions, unlike mine - you might be wondering what has changed in the remaster. The obvious thing is a redesigned control scheme for playing with a gamepad instead of a keyboard and mouse. The driving and shooting, in particular, have been tweaked.

The original game was not designed for controllers from the start, but the new controls feel fairly natural. I have been playing on the Switch, and haven’t missed the mouse-based interface of the original release. How it works now is that you walk through the environment with the left stick, and use the right stick to target different objects for interaction. Rather than hunting for an object, you can use the right stick to switch between all of the nearby options. This works well, and nicely deals with a common adventure game problem of having to hunt for more interaction targets.

Accessibility options have also been added, including the ability to skip driving minigames and a toggle to turn off lighting effects that could trigger seizures.

There have also been many improvements in terms of graphics and audio. In addition to the resolution being increased, the assets have been scaled up, and dynamic lighting and shadows have been added. The character models have been tweaked, based on input from Sam & Max creator Steve Purcell’s feedback. Visual effects have been added that were not possible in the Telltale engine back in 2007, including falling snow at the North Pole. The camera angles, character acting, and choreography have also all been adjusted by cinematic artists. The game looks nice, thanks to the visual overhaul. I have played on the Switch, and have had no issues - the game runs well and looks nice on either the TV or the tablet.

The audio in the original version was compressed to limit download sizes. The developers have collected the original voice actors and re-recorded their lines at a higher quality. The soundtrack was also re-recorded using live musicians, and new tracks were added by the original composer, Jared Emerson-Johnson.

It’s an impressive effort. This is a ton of work, when many remasters simply add higher resolutions and widescreen support. It really shows the passion of the developers for their creation, and is worth supporting.

Beyond these tweaks, the game itself still holds up well. The puzzles are clever, but not punishing, and you don’t need an advanced degree to solve them. The writing is still genuinely hilarious, although some of the jokes definitely place the game right in a particular time and place. Both of the remastered seasons of Sam & Max are worth revisiting if you haven’t gone back to them in years or playing now for the first time.

Official Webpage

Nintendo eShop

I know that this is 2020-brain talking to some extent, but 2006 feels like a lifetime ago. I guess it basically was. My cell phone was just a phone, I had way fewer aches and pains, and Sam & Max Season 1, Episode 1 (later retitled to Sam & Max Save the World) was blasting across my tiny CRT monitor - here to herald in the age of episodic gaming, games presented just like we watched TV!

I had (and still have) a lot of nostalgia for Sam & Max. The original was my first LucasArts adventure game, after I fell in love with (of all things) the Fox Kids cartoon. It sparked a lifelong love of point and click adventure games. It was funny, the puzzles were these beautifully tricky things that you had to chew on a bit to get - especially as a kid - and the 2D art was like playing with an interactive comic book. It was incredible. By 2006, I was so excited to get my hands on a new Sam & Max. It lived up to my hopes too - the game was a blast. It was refreshingly funny, the puzzles were clever, and I even enjoyed the episodic format. It was kind of cool to have a couple of hours of Sam & Max to play on a Friday night every month or so. 

Now, a lifetime away, that first season of Sam & Max is back again. Telltale Games, the developers behind the game, died in a blaze of fiery mismanagement. Episodic gaming never really caught on - although there are a few notable exceptions, like the latest set of Hitman games. We’re all stuck indoors while a global pandemic rages around us, and we’ve gone from joking about terror levels to wondering whether the secret service will have to drag an ex-president out of the White House kicking and screaming. A group of ex-Telltale employees, operating under the banner of Skunkape Games, have managed to secure the rights and assets to Sam & Max Save the World, and have remastered it for release on PC and the Nintendo Switch. 

I loved this game back in 2006, but has it aged well? Will it still be just as much fun, or will it feel like as much of a relic of a bygone era as it sounds like when I describe it? 

Let’s back up for a moment and talk about what this game is. Sam & Max Saves the World is a point and click adventure game. What this means, essentially, is that this is a game where you progress through a story by solving puzzles embedded in an environment that you explore. Your character has an inventory of items, and can use those items as part of manipulating your environment, all in service of advancing the story or opening up new parts of that environment. The “point and click” part of this comes from the traditional method of interaction - using your mouse to click on elements in that environment. 

Adventure games are not about combat or twitch action. Timing isn’t particularly precise or important, and you don’t need to memorize combinations of buttons. Rather, the gameplay is all about the puzzles. To give an example from the opening of Sam & Max Save the World, a rat in your office has stolen your phone and won’t return it until you present some Swiss cheese. How should you handle this? Well, your little buddy, Max, has filled the closet with cheese. Great, right? Not really, as it isn’t Swiss cheese. Fortunately, your inventory holds the solution - Sam’s revolver! Yep - Swiss cheese has holes, a gun can make holes, perfect! Yes, it isn’t exactly realistic, but it makes a certain kind of sense - in as much as Looney Tunes logic can make any kind of sense. If you can get into the right surreal mindset, the solutions tend to click into place.

The story of Same & Max revolves around the titular duo of “freelance police” - self-deputized crimefighters dedicated to solving mysteries and filling their wallets with sweet, sweet cash. Sam is a dog in a trench coat, and Max is a… rabbity… thing - a long-eared psychopath full of barely-contained insanity. As Sam & Max Save the World opens, a new threat has invaded their neighborhood - former child stars. Someone is brainwashing washed-up celebrities and sending them out for nefarious purposes. It is up to Sam & Max to investigate and get to the root of this conspiracy before the world ends up similarly brainwashed. Along the way, you’ll interact with quite the case of characters, from Bosco - genius inventor, conspiracy nut, and owner of the local (in)convenience store - to Sybil - tattoo artist and psychotherapist. 

As you can imagine from that description, Sam & Max is fully tongue-in-cheek - a surreal comedy full of gleeful sarcasm. It’s a bit Looney Tunes, a bit Calvin and Hobbes, and a touch of Far Side. It is a world where animals and humans freely interact and it isn’t particularly weird to shoot the cheese with a gun. It is delightfully hilarious. Even today, I was constantly cracking up at the conversations, and felt compelled to click on every single item just to see how it was described. Few games have comedy writing this sharp and hilarious, and this game is worth experiencing just for the script. 

Sam & Max Save the World is presented as a season of episodes, much like a TV show. There are six episodes in total in the first season. Each tells its own short story, which ties into the plot stretching across the entire season, before concluding in the dramatic season finale. Each episode lasts about an hour and a half to two hours. When this season first came out back in 2006, it was touted as both a fairly novel new way to present games and a way to stagger the development of a game in a more sustainable manner. The latter didn’t necessarily work out perfectly, but the former resulted in some interesting experiments in game storytelling. An episodic format makes no sense for many types of games, but is something I still kind of appreciate for this kind of game. 

I used to have a bit of a ritual with Telltale’s games, where I would play through a new episode on a Friday evening shortly after getting my copy of it. Since a little time had passed since the last episode, each felt fresh. My mind was ready to dig into that weird adventure game logic again. There is also something that feels nice about being able to get through something, beginning-to-end, in one night. 

The remaster presents you with all of the episodes at once, so you don’t get that imposed, natural spacing between them. However, I still ended up falling into a bit of a ritual with the new release. We’ve gone back into fairly restrictive lockdown again, with a resurgence in coronavirus cases. To avoid going stir-crazy, I’ve played through the season while pedaling on an exercise bike. I haven’t played each episode in a single session, but it still breaks up fairly nicely along scene-breaks. Kind of weird! However, I can definitely recommend doing something similar. Playing through the remaster this way has felt great, and this kind of game is perfect for this kind of activity, as it doesn’t require the incredible precision that more action-heavy games do. 

I’m happy to say that Sam & Max Save the World has held up quite well. A lot of that comes down to the work put into the remaster. Thankfully, the controls have been entirely overhauled - shifting from mouse pointer to compatibility with a controller. This overhaul has been implemented nicely. This doesn’t feel like a game that has been forced to work with a controller, but feels fairly natural. I have been playing on the Switch, and haven’t missed the mouse-based interface of the original release. How it works now is that you walk through the environment with the left stick, and use the right stick to target different objects for interaction. Rather than hunting for an object, you can use the right stick to switch between all of the nearby options. This works well, and nicely deals with a common adventure game problem of having to hunt for more interaction targets. 

The graphics have also been nice updated. Sam & Max Save the World was a relatively low-budget 3D game released almost 15 years ago. It could have looked fairly bad if the only upgrade was a resolution bump. Instead, the assets have been ported to the final version of the Telltale game engine and the animation has been update. The character models have been updated with input from Sam & Max creator and cartoonist, Steve Purcell. Finally, all  of the lighting has been overhauled. As a result, the game looks far nicer than it originally did. You can still tell that this is an older game, but it isn’t an eyesore. It’s colorful, and the style is nice and cartoony. It hasn’t aged quite as elegantly as the original 2D Sam & Max, but the updates have done quite a lot. 

One aspect where you can really see the age of the game is in the writing. Many of the jokes directly reference the pop culture and events of the time, especially the little references you see in the environment. The bathrooms have a “terror color” sign, there are questions about weapons of mass destruction, Oprah is referenced quite a bit. I don’t necessarily think this is a negative. I definitely noticed how much of the humor is dated, but a lot of it is still pretty funny - and there are plenty of timeless lines beyond the dated references. However, younger games may not get as much out of the release. It’s an interesting challenge for comedy-based games, especially. I think this is the first remaster that I’ve played where the age of the script mattered, and it isn’t something you can address by updating some character models. I also don’t know if it is a problem, exactly, but it does place some potential bounds on the age of the audience that will understand all of the jokes and references. 

I was relieved to see how well Sam & Max Save the World has held up. The writing is genuinely hilarious, the puzzles are clever without being punishingly hard, and the control and graphical upgrades have done a nice job of keeping the game from feeling too dated. The episodic format keeps the pacing brisk, and enables flexibility in how you play through the full game. I definitely recommend checking it out. I have played on the Switch, and have had no issues - the game runs well and looks nice on either the TV or the tablet. 

Sam & Max feels like a series that leaves and returns in different eras of my life. The original was an important part of my childhood, the Telltale games landed while I was in college, and this remaster (and the upcoming VR game) are here in my mid-30s. It has been fun to think about just how much has changed between each reemergence of the franchise. I wonder what the world will look like the next time Sam & Max return. Hopefully, it won’t be quite as long of a wait next time. 

Official Website

Nintendo eShop

The Almost Gone opens with you, our protagonist, alone in a dreamlike version of your bedroom where everything is - somehow - so close to correct while also being so very, very wrong. The doors are locked, the windows show a black void, tree roots are bursting through the walls, and you can’t help but feel a lurking dread behind every door. You realize that something is wrong, very wrong, and that the path forward requires understanding what happened to you and your family. Isolated and alone, you are pushed forward by a promise - that safety lies in the treehouse. Getting there will prove to be quite the journey, requiring that you solve some dastardly puzzles and uncover the disturbing secrets hidden by each member of your family. 

The game takes place over five acts, each in a different location. Each stage is split into a series of rooms, portrayed as little dioramas that you can rotate to view from different angles. Essentially, The Almost Gone is a point-and-click adventure game. To move forward, you need to solve increasingly elaborate puzzles, generally to get the key to a locked door. Solving puzzles requires examining the environment - each room - from different angles in search of clues. In some cases, you are looking over objects for things like the number that forms part of a locker combination. In other cases, you are trying to collect items, like a cup for a water dispenser. 

As you solve these puzzles, you will come across objects that spark a memory from the protagonist or notes left behind by, for instance, a family member. Through the environmental storytelling, you slowly uncover hints about what happened to you, and the history of your broken family. I should warn you that The Almost Gone is not a happy game. It definitely deals with topics like suicide, abuse, and mental health. However, the core story - by Belgian author Joost Vandecasteele - never fails to be intriguing. 

The Almost Gone is a very interesting little game. It is absolutely beautiful - a treat to look at. The art direction is weird and surreal - presenting a muted and dreamlike world. I loved looking over each and every little diorama. As I mentioned, the story is also quite interesting. The core idea of presenting the game as a series of little connected dioramas is also fresh and clever. There is a lot to like here.

At the same time, I didn’t always enjoy *playing* The Almost Gone. The puzzles are fairly basic. Most of your time, instead, goes into the “pixel hunt” that so many point-and-clicks are famous for. Especially on the Switch’s tiny screen, it is not obvious what you can interact with in the environment, and you will spend a lot of time looking for just one more tiny clue. That said, I don’t think this should stop you from checking the game out if you’re curious. The presentation aspects of the game are well worth experiencing, and the game itself does not overstay its welcome. 

I played through The Almost Gone on the Switch. In general, this feels like it should be a good platform for this type of game - an adventure-puzzle sort of affair. However, on the tablet screen, everything is just a bit too small. The font is kind of hard to read, and the fine details of the little rooms are not quite as obvious. It may just be my old eyes, but I definitely felt a lot happier when I switched to the TV. This is not a technically demanding game, so it should play smoothly on any device you can get it on. I would just recommend putting it on a big screen when you dive in. 

Overall, The Almost Gone is a fascinating, short game - maybe a couple of hours long. It is visually striking and tells an interesting story. I got a little tired of clicking on everything for clues - a better indication of what you can click on would have improved the experience without making it too easy - but I still would recommend sinking an evening into it.

A copy of The Almost Gone was provided for this review.

Nintendo eShop

Official Website