Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse Remastered (Switch) Review

Sam and Max hit the road again! Former Telltale Games employee run Skunkape Games have remastered the third game from the Telltale Games series. Jumping in with a review of the third game is a tricky prospect – if you haven’t played any of the games, then I definitely recommend starting with the first game rather than jumping in here.

Sam and Max are a wise-cracking anthropomorphic Dog and Rabbit (respectively) duo who work as freelance police (sometimes). This game starts off straight away with an alien invasion by a gorilla-like alien called General Skun-ka’pe. Skun-ka’pe is invading the neighbourhood in search of the ‘Devil’s Toybox’, and powerful psychically charged objects called the “Toys of Power” for their own evil ends. This kicks off a race to collect these powerful Toys and save the world from a great Lovecraftian evil. 

I remember playing through the series when it was on the PC, and replaying the first season on the Wii. What I mostly remember is that the more self contained episodic nature meant you were spending a lot of time returning to the same locations and characters, although this improved in later episodes. 

The Devil’s Playhouse’s five episodes aren’t as self-contained as season one (Sam & Max Save the World). Whereas Save the World has its larger arc loosely tying the season together, Devil’s Playhouse is very much an ongoing story through the episodes. While you can play any episode in any order you want, you’d be doing yourself a disservice if this was your first playthrough.

The episodic nature helps to break up the story, keeping it to 2-3 hours before a change of scenery. 10-15 hours is a good amount of time for a game that gets so much out of the dialogue and humour, it could easily hit a point of diminishing returns at any longer. By the third game (of this series, not including Hit the Road) you should have a pretty good idea if the humour of this series is for you. There is more of it throughout the entire game, so if Max’s hyperactive sociopathic outbursts bugged you previously, then the third time around likely won’t change that.

The first episode feels the most traditional for the series, despite the game moving away from some of the more familiar locales. The second episode involves trying to piece together a puzzle through snippets of film reel in a sequential order, requiring you to jump back and forth across the reels to progress. My explanation might not be the best, but it makes sense once you’re there. The third episode leans into a Noir angle, with Sam on his own and looking for answers. There is still plenty of the more familiar Sam & Max puzzle solving across the episodes, although there is a new mechanic that plays a part in how puzzles are solved. Max gains psychic powers through the ‘Toys of Power’ allowing a variety of different ways to progress. The most straightforward is the ability to see glimpses into a person’s or object’s future, in some cases providing a little hint to what you need to do next. Then there’s abilities such as turning Max into a copy of an object, ventriloquism, and teleportation. There are some inventive ways of using these powers, and initially it takes some getting used to. The powers are integral to solving many puzzles throughout the game.

Sam & Max remains a point-and-click adventure game, even though the game was originally made to accommodate controller-based gaming. On the Switch you can use the touch controls to interact as a point-and-click game, while you can still directly control Sam by physical controls. The Devil’s Playhouse harkens back to a time when point-and-click adventure puzzles could rely on some pretty obtuse, left-of-field solutions. You can choose how frequently the hints the game drops if you do get stuck, although I rarely found them helpful to actually solving a puzzle. Fortunately, with this being a game originally from 2010, walkthroughs and guides are definitely available, so you don’t need to remain stuck.

Skunkape Games has given The Devil’s Playhouse the remaster treatment just as they have with the previous two games. The game has been updated to widescreen and definitely runs much less glitchy than it did way back when (Telltale episodic games were notably prone to bugs and crashes). The studio has also done some work on the visuals with much improved lighting too, on top of better sound quality. 

Sam & Max The Devil’s Playhouse wraps up the (formerly) Telltale Games series, giving us more of the Freelance Police duo while changing up enough to keep a third game fresh. The remaster treatment makes the game look and sound better, but is still very much the same game. Luckily, it also happens to be a good one! If you haven’t played one of the games in the series before, this is a strange point to jump in – go play the other games first. For longtime Sam & Max fans, you’ve likely been waiting for this re-release already, but it’s worth checking out this conclusion to the series. 

Rating: 4/5