#beyond time and space
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.
