Sam & Max Hit the Road

I'd not played or even seen Sam & Max as a kid, so nostalgia's not too strong on this one. It's a fun, funny and inventive point-and-click with wacky puzzles and great dialogue/voice acting. However technically, it holds itself back. The wacky puzzles are, uh, nearly impossible to think up, even if it's not hard to get two thirds of the solution. A puzzle where you need Max to take something involves a dialogue option that doesn't fit on the screen, a circumstance when you light up a cave seems like everything you light up should be interactive, you need multiple looks-like-background items to complete the game, there are often times when no one has any useful advice for you and getting to the game's last screen is actually such a messy clickfest that I didn't even know it existed. So it's a flawed classic. It's beloved for good reason, but it's definitely got these shortcomings.

The game is genuinly a lot of fun, with a great (though dry) sense of humor, impressive visuals (for 1993) and a catchy soundtrack. But, it also has some absolutely atrocious puzzles with ridiculous solutions. This was presumably done to ensure that players wouldn't beat this game in under 2 hours (which is definitely possible). The hintbook that comes with the game alleviates this somewhat, but you have to go to your desktop every time to open the PDF. Is this game worth the cost? Yes, definitely. Just be aware of the the bats**t puzzles that plague this game.

Sam and Max: Hit the Road is a great game but one that suffers from many of the negative adventure game tropes. In terms of logic this game is far from the worse even given the setting, a good few times the game qives you fairly decent hints on its own. But other times that the game wants you to do is very specific. Dino tooth comes to mind, as the the yeti hold up (you'll figure it out if you play, no big spoilers). Another big problem I had was max as a tool. There where a couple of situations where i had the right idea but didnt think to use max or I didn't use him right. Its frustating when you have the "correct" answer but the the "right way". But honestly its all pointless because the game comes with the hint book anyways, and its kind enough to ease you in with the first sentance rather than blurting it outright at the start. In all honesty I played the game legit for about 70%, had 20% tell me the "right way" for my "Correct" answer, and the rest was telling me the stuff I missed outright. I recommoned playing until you run out of Ideas and then go hit the book. While it is satifiying to beat a adventure game with no help its silly to get frusterated over a game thats so fun like Sam and Max.

Sam & Max hit the road contrary to it's title does not involve Sam and or Max hitting a slab of concrete for 4-6 hours, rather Sam and his Lagomorph pal Max must search for a big hairy bigfoot and his long giraffe necked girlfriend. It's full of creative and funny dialogue, and a bunch of puzzles that make my pea brain snap. Basically what i'm saying is buy this game with money and if you don't have money find some. It's worth every cent.

I am pretty sure this review will be lost among pages and pages or words, but anyway, my important opinion: Sam&Max was developed in a kind of rush after Day of the Tentacle (and it shows - some characters are recycled from that game, a habit that would be followed up in the Telltale series) but it shows a professionalism from Lucasarts at that era that is almost scary. The plot is a satire of USA tourist traps (I was surprised when I learnt that all the places of the game either exist or exist in a very similar manner), the design is open ended as only Lucasarts really knew how to do it, and the production values are pretty. It may not have the same character as their other adventures, mostly because they get humour and characters from a franchise whose humour was different from a DOTT or Monkey Island, but this turns out into a laidback sunny "road movie" adventure that never feels totally unfair in its enigmas and puzzles. Ok, the interface is not the best (I get tired of right clicking over and over) but the digs at the awesomely ugly and laughable museums are golden. And most of all, I love the kind of Marx brothers chaos nature of it all. No, most of all: it planted the seed for the Telltale adventures.