Sam & Max The Devils Playhouse (v1.0)

Sam & Max The Devil’s Playhouse. Sam the straight-shooting dog and Max the hyperactive bunny have been solving mysteries and fighting crime together as the Freelance Police for quite some time now. Since the anthropomorphic pair has been under Telltale’s care, they’ve been embarking on point-and-click adventures divvied up into episodes. The latest season, The Devil’s Playhouse, is a great offering for fans of the franchise and people who love adventure games. Narrated by a plump man with crazy awesome hair in a setting reminiscent of the Twilight Zone, the season begins with Sam and Max aboard a spaceship shaped like a monkey head. The ship is owned by evil space ape General Skun’ka’pe’ (or, as Sam and Max call him, Skunkape) who’s focused on collecting the “Toys of Power” to gain control of the world. Y’know, the typical evil space ape motivation. After banishing the General to the Penal Zone (best name for a prison ever), it turns out that the whole scenario was actually a visualization of the future. It appears that the seemingly harmless View-Master toy Max picked up in an alley was actually one of the Toys of Power and touching it sparked his psychic potential and granted him the power of seeing the future. With such awesome functions, it makes sense that Skun’ka’pe isn’t the only one searching for the toys. In addition to the ape, a fez-wearing necromancer called Paperwaite seeks them in order to summon the dark God Yog-Saggoth back to this dimension. The yarn unravels from there, including a power-crazed teenage Pharaoh brain, Max’s stolen brain and masses of Sam clones (lovingly called “dogglegangers”). All chapters of The Devil’s Playhouse are self-contained stories that tell a piece of the overarching saga about the mysterious Devil’s Toybox and Toys of Power. Following sci-fi and noir film themes, there’s an introduction, climax and conclusion to every game but there’s also always some unanswered questions and a twist at the very last moment to lead players into the next episode’s storyline. This method of storytelling is well executed and the twists and turns are fun to experience. To keep the game fresh, each episode is structured differently. For example Episode 2: The Tomb of Sammun-Mak requires player to jump around different sections of a movie reel while Episode 4: Alley of the Dolls is more of a linear exploit.