Sam & Max Hit the Road

It’s hard to pick a favorite when it comes to Lucasarts adventures but if I had to choose, it would be Hit the Road. I’ve been a lifelong fan of the comic and cartoon that Sam & Max come from and it would be hard to ever get a better adaptation than this for a game. The voice actors really bring these ridiculous characters to life and the humor is dark and witty. Dropping the verb interface for a simple icon based system makes it easy to enjoy everything the game has to offer.

This is my first time playing through Sam & Max Hit The Road, and I've gotta say, I'm surprised by how little I had heard of this game up until I came to GOG. This game was really charming and I am very happy that I played through it. That said, it was over far too quickly for me. I beat the game in around 6 hours without a walkthrough and that's because even though the humor may be somewhat adult at times, the game is still designed for children in terms of difficulty. That's not really a problem as I still got stumped two or three times during the game, but I would have compensated for the lower difficulty of the puzzles by having more environments to explore. Still, it was a very memorable game, and I'll treasure Sam & Max Hit the Road as one of my favorite Point & Click adventure games, as I am a huge fan of the comic book-style / cartoony niche of the genre. I rarely laugh at jokes, in-game or otherwise, but Sam & Max got me a few times which surprised me quite a bit. If you think your sense of humor is 'dumb', you enjoy cartoon art styles and character, and you enjoy solving funny, cartoony but definitely logical inventory puzzles, I'd say you should give Sam & Max Hit the Road a shot, even at its low full price of $5.99

I loved this game as much as I love pretty much every Lucasarts games. It's crazy, it's satiric, it's a lot of pretty much anything. You'll laugh and you'll have good times solving this crazy adventure of a DOG and a RABBIT. Hilarious, isn't?

See all those 5 star reviews? Those extra stars are nostalgia points. If you're on your first play of the game, you'll find that Sam & Max is pretty average. Not bad or not enjoyable. But average. Can't really compare it e.g. with the first Monkey Island games. I dare to say that even Maniac Mansion (6 years older) had better puzzles. The main issue with Sam & Max is that the scripting still feels a bit rough. First, I found myself in multiple occassions having guessed correctly what I need to do, but being unable to find the correct way to do it. The hintbook does help you out from these silly situations. But is it really necessary to have to consult the hintbook in order to spot an elevator door? Or why should it be so hard to ask Max to shut the door he's holding open? Sometimes Sam & Max kind of gave me the feeling I'm playing a text adventure and I'm fighting against the text parser's limitations. Second, there are no hints on when it is the right time to use Max to solve a puzzle. I'm not sure if LucasArts just expected players to be familiar with some of Max's traits from the comic-book series, so invoking him comes naturally. But for me it usually boiled down to having tried everything else and failed. All-in-all, Sam & Max is funny and humorous, with some decent puzzles. But definitely not LucasArts finest piece of work.

This was a PC classic, just like Day of the Tentacle. You have to love Sam & Max's humor and the silliness of the storyline. A few bumpy puzzles to figure out, but overall a fun game to tackle in a weekend!