Sam & Max Hit the Road

This game was in the LucasArts Archive cd collection, which along with Doom 2 and Myst, the first computer games I ever bought. I still have the disc but was unable to get it to run. An instant purchase for me. Next....Grim Fandango! Well, a guy can hope, can't he?

I recently played a great retro Adventure game. It was funny, thrilling, beautiful to look at, and played very well with plenty of well made puzzles and an excellent story to hold it all together. That game was Primordia and I wholly recommend it. Unfortunately, this is not Primordia. I really wanted to like this game, I really did, but oh how I just can’t. It just has so much of what I hate about these kinds of adventure games. Puzzles that rely on arbitrary order of execution to work right, or follow poorly explained (if explained at all) rules, slow as molasses animations that make actions take way too long to do, especially with ones you have to do multiple times, and just a non-engaging story. It started well enough, but after an hour or so, the problems began to creep up. Here’s one big problem. Say you’re stuck on a puzzle, or don’t know what to do or where to go. In Primordia, you talk to your sidekick friend, and he gives helpful little bits of info, like “Maybe we should go here”, or “Did you know I can do this thing when you use me?”. In Sam & Max, when you say you’re confused, Max just says he’s moreso. Gee that was helpful, especially since at certain points when you need to use Max on items, they never even hint that he can be used, and he is used for some outlandish purposes that you wouldn’t logically think of. And that is one big problem with this game. It doesn’t explain well what things do or how they can be used. It seems as if the classic method of guessing and testing answers to puzzles, and even simple item interactions was intended here. While there is a logic to puzzles (be it a cartoonish logic), It's poorly or not even explained, making it seem illogical. Another thing, as mentioned before, is the slow animation. There’s not really much to say about it, but man can it be bothersome. Some actions just take way too long, and certain situations require you to perform the same thing over and over again that just drag on and on. Even simply moving from one location to another can take unneeded amounts of time due to the method of transportation, or because you have to wait for you sidekick Max to catch up to you because he wonders around aimlessly instead of following you. It’s tedious, unnecessary, and not at all fun. Finally, the last thing I want to note is that this game suffers from the rough design styles of old Adventure games, such as making soooo much of the world available to explore. This makes it so you can be in areas, finding objects for puzzles you’re not even close to being ready to solve yet, and there’s not a good sense of direction. This can be especially problematic when it comes to items and the finding thereof. You may need an item you didn’t even notice or wouldn’t have guessed the location of that in a completely different location from the puzzle you need it for. Two necessary items, a light bulb and wad of cash, can be easily missed in the very beginning of the game if you don’t check for them, despite having no reason to at the time. This problem also results from the visual ambiguity of certain things. Significant items and intractable things don’t stick out sometimes, which can lead to not knowing what I needed to interact with. Also, inventory and action systems are needlessly complex, as you need to switch between five different actions (plus an item) with the proper keys or right clicking where just left click for interaction and using an item, and right click for analyzing objects would do. Instead, you have to cycle through to find the proper action required. It’s most annoying when you need to do something relatively quickly. Thankfully, a hint book comes with installation in the game folder, which helps the score, but man, after playing this, Day of the Tentacle, and the first two Monkey Island games, I cannot see why Lucasarts is so beloved for their adventure games. I say Telltales makes better adventure games, the guys who make Samorost make better Adventure Games, Wormwood Studios makes better Adventure games, and I could go on. I’ve played a good deal of Adventure games, and Lucasarts have probably been the worst of all of them in every aspect. Worst story, worst gameplay and controls, and worst puzzles. I’d give this one star, but the funny character dialogue and wacky themes, plus the great hintbook complete with comics and short stories are significant enough positives to save this game from being outright terrible to me and at least worth completing, but I am never buying another Lucasarts game again.

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.

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