Adventure Gamers - Forums

It is easy to forget, that before Telltale Games started specializing in Visual Novels with Excessive Button Mashing™ (or whatever you want to call it), they actually made adventure games! And not only did they make adventure games, but the games they made were also of general high quality, and some of the best available at the time.

It is also easy to overlook the fact, that Telltale was one of the few companies that carried the torch through the dark years, and provided a steady stream of AG’s during a time where most companies especially in the USA, considered the genre to be dead. In fact I had a period of a couple of years where I had abandoned the genre myself, and it was a random discovery of the first season of Sam & Max that dragged me back to the AG genre.

Anyway, the very best that Telltale has ever made is (imo) the third season of Sam & Max also know as The Devil’s Playhouse, and the best episode (again imo) is The Tomb of Sammun-Mak.

In this episode Sam & Max finds a projector with four different reels depicting the adventures of their great grandfathers, Sameth and Maximus. So in this episode we are not playing as Sam & Max but instead as Sameth and Maximus.

The big trick to this episode is however that we can freely switch between the four different reels, and this allows us to jump back and forth in the story. From a puzzle perspective it is really not so different from when you have multiple protagonists that you can switch between controlling, and where you have to make some progress with one char before you can continue with another char.

For example, lets say that we bump into Amelia Earhart as a small baby, and in order to continue with the story we have to make her fall to sleep. There is no way to do this at first, so instead we change the reel and play as much as we can in the other parts of the game. Sooner or later we learn what her favourite lullaby is, so we jump back to the first reel and play that lullaby for her, and now we can continue with this reel.

The difference is of course, that instead of simply switching between characters, then we are effectively jumping back and forth in time - except of course that no actual time-travel is involved. It is only how we the player (and Sam & Max) are experiencing the story in a non-chronological order, whereas Sameth and Maximus are technical experiencing things in the chronological order - except of course that they (we) are using information that they couldn’t possibly know at this time in the story, to solve the different puzzles

Confusing? Not really, it all makes perfect sense within the logic of the game, and even though the story is non-chronological, then they are very careful about the order in which different information is given to us the player.

One thing here is the puzzle perspective, which was funny enough in its own, but what I really liked about this, was how it allowed for a very non-chronological story telling and of course some wacky moments. Personally I’m a big fan of non-chronological story telling, and think that it is a shame, that there aren’t more games that uses this, but I guess that it is something that is easier to pull of in a book or movie than it is in a game.

chrissie - 30 March 2016 02:30 PM

I’ve never played any of the Sam & Max games

Seriously if/when you get the time you really should. Hit the Road is one of those classics that everybody ought to play at least once, and all three seasons of Telltales Sam & Max is actually very good, and something I believe you would enjoy.