Sam & Max Hit the Road

While the humor is witty, it can feel forced at times. Also, the pixel hunting is atrocious and puzzles don't make any sense.

The jokes are better than Leisure Suit Larry (who gets a call-out), but "better" is relative, and a lot of the dialogue is "Max hasn't said something in a while so here's a quip!" There are a few good lines, and it's fun trying to figure out how many characters Bill Farmer is voicing, but it's a tough ask for that to carry what is otherwise an obtuse and illogical puzzle adventure game with 40-ish items you have to figure out how to use. The 1993 interface doesn't help at all with "how was I supposed to know I could even touch that" levels of pixel hunting, or characters' hitboxes almost entirely overlapping things you must use, so you keep interacting with the wrong thing. Or, scenes that straight up hide that you can walk to one of the edges and there's extremely important things over there you couldn't see, which nothing in the scene mentions. I appreciate that LucasArts' design relied on never killing or softlocking the players, but they miss that frequently saving and trying things that might kill you, was also a form of player feedback, and in some cases definitely a better one than just not knowing if you can pick up that champagne bottle (you can) or that there's an elevator to another area behind the wall (there is) or that you need a lightbulb from a closet offscreen (you do). The plot itself seems to forget that it was important, and you fully resolve the case you started out with midway through the game, but just sort of ... keep going anyway, because there's more puzzles and jokes, but you don't have any further imperative or motive to do this other than "maybe there'll be more funny lines somewhere". GOG's release comes with the hint book, which is enough to get you through without spoiling things, but, Jesus Christ

Waiting for the remaster from the original authors!

I loved the Monkey Island adventures and Day of the Tentacle, so I was really looking forward to this game. I was assured my many other reviews that it would be really funny, with a lot of memorable characters and all the hallmarks of a great LucasArts adventure. But this was far from the case. The characters are for the most part bland and uninteresting, there's maybe one memorable character (the chief's wife), the rest are soulless props just there to advance the plot. I was expecting to fall in love with Sam & Max, but while there are a few nice moments it's hard to get a sense of who they are as characters. The humor falls flat, aside from a few lines. A lot of the time there isn't any attempt at humor beyond the characters being in strange situations. Monkey Island is about a thousand times funnier than this game, which I wasn't expecting. The plot is paper-thin, among the worst I've ever played in an adventure game. The game is spent visiting random, disconnected locations across the country trying to find an escaped bigfoot. There are no real plot twists, revelations, or interesting conflicts that arise. If this was made into a movie I would fall asleep in the theater. The puzzles are nonsenical: A walkthrough is really needed since the solutions rarely make sense and it's unclear what needs to be done next. There are no dialogue puzzles which made Monkey Island (and so many other P&C's) fun. The interface is really bad. Often I couldn't control the characters, since they moved in the opposite direction from where I clicked. One of the best parts of these games is trying absurd combinations and hearing witty retorts, but Sam would always say "I can't use that" or similar. Also, I should note that the save/load/options menu has been replaced with the terrible SCUMMVM system, which really detracts from the game. To top it all off, the game is very short. In sum, a really poor adventure. I don't understand why it was rated so highly.

I loved this game as a kid and still love it now, now bring us Day of the Tentacle & the Monkey island games please :)