When Telltale Games shuttered its windows years ago, it was a heavy blow to the gaming landscape in general. The episodic style of storytelling was compelling, exciting, and honestly opened up a laundry list of games for me to enjoy in different capacities. Things like The Wolf Among Us, The Walking Dead, and, of course, Tales of Monkey Island were a delight. The acquisition of the titles by LCG Entertainment ensured the existing games could live on, but the future remains uncertain. Interestingly, it seems that four members of a different development team to acquire the rights to the Sam & Max titles, putting forward their best effort to bring those titles back to life. Now, under the flag of Skunkape Games LLC, the third of the seasons finally joins the previous two in remastered, modern console glory, with Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse Remastered.

Spread across five episodes of madness and eyebrow-raising humor, The Devil’s Playhouse brings back the duo of Sam and Max, a trenchcoat wearing dog and a blatantly psychotic rabbit, to investigate and discover more about the mysteries of the universe. This time, the pair have discovered The Toys of Power, seemingly innocuous objects that give Max a spread of psychic abilities, like traveling through phone lines, voice projection, and reading minds. In very short order, we go from trying to capture evil gorilla alien overlords to getting sucked into ancient films with sinister plot twists and then Max having his whole brain stolen. This all leads up to some brouhaha involving eldritch gods and the like, not to mention a whole cloning arc, but not to worry: with Sam’s sharp wit and itchy trigger finger and Max’s…being Max, we’ll sort the whole thing out by dinner time.

I…sure? Wait, are we all on the same page here?

For those who enjoyed the old Sam & Max titles both in the Lucasarts days and the original Telltale Games releases, players should know that The Devil’s Playhouse is a different approach than some of the first iterations. While the concept of pointing and clicking around to engage with perps, use items with other items, and experiment to see what happens, most of the controls and the engagement have been remapped to be more accessible for controller appeal. This means a lot more of Sam walking around to get to places in order to “click” and Max needing to use shoulder buttons and two joysticks to effectively decide where his powers will be used. It works, for the most part, but players should be aware of their own orientation and adapt to the layout as quickly as possible.

Each episode of The Devil’s Playhouse is made up of multiple chapters and have varying lengths overall. For example, your first foray into the game (an episode entitled The Penal Zone) goes rather quickly, asking for less than an hour to basically get you acclimated for what you’ll be doing across the remainder of the game. Others, like episode three (They Stole Max’s Brain!) tend to play out in a more drawn-out form, asking players to engage in the same conversations multiple times in order to discover the right combination of answers and timed interruptions in order to glean the correct path forward to discovering who stole the rabbit’s brainstem.

Sometimes you really need to lay into a gorilla to get the truth about brain snatchers.

There are moments of the game that work exceptionally well. Specifically, I liked when we were less focused on the Toys of Power and more focused on the interview and interrogation routine simply because that ported well to this modern sensibility. While it’s definitely more of a Phoenix Wright style of approach, it makes sense for Sam to grill everyone he encounters and also inject his own style of noir reflections and hyper-aggressive implications in order to make the conversations flow and respond in exciting ways. As a result, episodes three and five were probably my favorite, even though there was a lower presence of Max as a result.

Conversely, the use of the Toys of Power are what make The Devil’s Playhouse so unique, but they sometimes feel a bit hamfisted and forced in order to make sense. When you begin episode one, you’ve got this host of abilities from the drop and they all have logical uses (well, as logical as this game can be) so it moves quite naturally. But when you drop into episode two (The Tomb of Sammun-Mak), you have abilities, lose them, and then need to get them back. It’s a weird give and take that, yes, is not arbitrary, but it’s still disappointing to need to ferret out the same activation points and trigger moments time after time, particularly if you decide to repeat certain sections of the episode again to see different conversational paths.

Sometimes the screenshots just speak for themselves.

More than anything, I love the humor and voicework throughout The Devil’s Playhouse. Sam and Max have fantastic rapport and can go back and forth with dry wit and bananas observations until the cows come home. Other characters tend to be oddly hyperbolic figures that would be out of place anywhere else but fit in fantastically here. Mole Man cults that are watching over the downfall of the world. The statue of Abraham Lincoln, now brought to life and married. Gorilla goons who spin signs on street corners. And, of course, a very intelligent chicken who knows enough to not get mixed up in this caper because he’d prefer not to be eaten. It’s this great level of silliness that never gets overly childish, mostly because the humor and the content are NOT for children.

For fans of The Devil’s Playhouse in the original incarnation, you may want to pick this up on Steam so that you can obtain the first version of the game as free DLC. If you’re determined to play on the Switch, know that you can only access the Remastered version, which looks great…usually. Particularly in the fifth episode (The City That Dares Not Sleep) you may encounter a lot of playback errors during extended animation sequences. Audio would progress without any on-screen animation, and then it would need to replay itself like a DVD with a scratch on the disk. While it thankfully didn’t affect moments where I was trying to choose something, it happened with enough frequency that it annoyed me and needs to be mentioned. (Edit: as of the most recent patch, this issue has been resolved. Thanks, Skunkape!)

Me, every time my mother has one too many and talks about her dating life before my dad.

The great thing that Skunkape Games LLC has done here has been to ensure that Sam & Max can live on beyond the fall of Telltale Games, and, all performance issues aside, the Remastered graphics and touched-up audio of The Devil’s Playhouse are charming and enjoyable. Players can easily jump from episode to episode, and finishing an episode means easily accessing the different chapters therein. For less than twelve hours of total playtime, Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse delivers a solid package of investigation, humor, and some wild moments without overstaying its welcome. I think any longtime fan of the series would be pleased to have the furry detective agency on their modern consoles, and you should run to pick this up today.

 

Graphics: 8.0 While the remaster doesn’t totally overwrite the previous designs, it does improve on the color palette and the way the new character shapes can pop on modern displays. It’s not a total conversion, and i appreciate that.	Gameplay: 6.0 The explorative nature of the game is sometimes curtailed by not being able to fully investigate your surroundings in a cohesive manner. Sam can’t always get the camera to move at the right time, resulting in some serious plodding to get into position. Max’s powers are fun, but often limited in their actual scope of the game’s ask.
Sound: 9.5 Voicework is absolutely bang on, shot through with plenty of music that ranges from dark detective to whimsical ambiance. The whole thing could be an audiobook and I’d love the hell out of it. The narrator isn’t as present as much as you’d expect and that’s such a shame, but otherwise no complaints.	Fun Factor: 7.5 Being able to have fun and deliver joke after joke while still taking itself seriously is no small feat, and The Devil’s Playhouse is witty, charming, and rakish in delivery and execution. While I didn’t always love how the controls made me feel, once I was in the pocket I had a grand time conversing, experimenting, and just loving the universe overall.
Final Verdict: 7.5

Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse Remastered is available now on Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse Remastered was provided by the publisher.