Sam & Max: Save the World
The world is a crazy place, and in crazy places crazy things can happen. It is up to the freelance police to help keep everything under control… well… maybe not control exactly, but maybe a few less bad things will happen? In Sam & Max: Save the World you will be taking control of Sam and Max, but for the most part you’re going to be sticking with Sam. Sam is a dog detective with a nose for solving crimes… sorry I had to… Max is his insane sidekick who is chaos made physical. You will be taking on a series of 6 cases, each mysteriously linked to the previous one. You will meet a wide range of characters, some of which you will run into no matter the case you will be taking on.
Although Sam & Max: Save the World originally came out in 2006 from TellTale Games, a remastered version has since been created by Skunkape Games and was officially released in December 2020. As is the case with many point-click adventure games you’re going to have to put your thinking cap on and there are going to be times where you will need to jump to conclusions in order to advance the story. There were definitely parts of the game where I found myself using the trial and error method on interactable objects (furniture, car, people, etc) to get to that next piece of the story.
The curse of old-school point and click adventure games is that you had to make those big leaps in logic to complete a part of the story, and I feel nowadays that there is a lot of hand holding so as to keep the gamer engaged. Even though I traversed the games of old, I’ve become spoiled with being able to easily see where the next step is going to be, this game doesn’t do that, and no matter how much I wished it some of the solutions to advance the story had no rhyme or reason to them and dumb luck got me through it. Constantly having to deal with that approach does not make for an enjoyable gaming experience.
I did love the fact that almost everything was voice-acted (there’s one section that isn’t but there’s a reason for it). The dialog that occurs in the game ranges all over the place from informative, insane, humorous, slightly uncomfortable, and downright bizarre. I do have one side-note on the dialog, and it has to do with the subtitles in the game. I have recently gotten into the habit of having the subtitles on just to make sure I don’t miss out on anything. In this game they made the choice to color code the character’s dialogue, and the issue I can see is that for some gamers they may have a difficult time seeing the text from some of the characters.
Each chapter/episode took around 1 hour and a half to complete, so there’s definitely a solid bit of content available to you (around 9 hours in total). I liked the fact that it was okay to make mistakes, you could choose the wrong dialog option, and sure you might have to start over a series of answers but there was never that one instance of “perma-fail”. That being said, it feels like this mechanic was introduced to cover for the vagueness of certain sections (those trial and error because I have no idea what to do next sections).
Was this game worth playing? I think so, my experience with this game was all over the place, kind of like the character Max. There were times where I wanted to rage quit, there were times where I found myself chuckling over the absurdity occurring in that moment, but mostly there were times where I was just grasping at straws so that I could keep the game going. The Sam & Max franchise has been around since 1987 (in comic format) and has a legion of fans that love and support it. I’m coming into this game not really knowing much of the history of the franchise, and I think that this might be partially to blame when it comes to me not being able to completely lock into the game and the story. I wouldn’t say that this game, as a whole, was a chore to play, but there were definitely chunks of this game where I had to forcefully push myself to keep playing.