Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse remastered review — HOLY PSYCHIC LAGOMORPHS DANCING THE CAN-CAN ON THE PRECIPICE OF INSANITY, MAX!

By David Flynn and Ron Burke

Posted on August 13, 2024

Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse was the Freelance Police’s final adventure for a time, and it certainly feels like a spectacular finale. The 2010 adventure game was one of Telltale’s last traditional adventure games before switching over to the more narrative focused format formalized by The Walking Dead. It’s been great to revisit the Telltale Sam & Max trilogy through Skunkape’s remasters, and The Devil’s Playhouse follows the same trend of excellence as the other two titles.

The Devil’s Playhouse picks up shortly after Beyond Time and Space, with an alien gorilla invading the earth looking for powerful childrens’ toys. Coincidentally, these toys grant Max psychic powers such as the ability to see the future, read minds, and throw his voice just as the mystical ventriloquists did in ancient times. Using these powers, Sam’s nearly bottomless inventory, and their collective depravity, the pair must save New York and the known universe from villains across five episodes.

This third season is a bit of a departure from the previous two. The locations you explore are much smaller and more dense, making the inventory object puzzles far more focused. Dialogue trees are also simplified to a radial menu, making it easier to tell when you’ve exhausted a character’s dialogue or when one option triggers an event. When exploring, you can also press a button to switch between Sam and Max, with the latter being able to use any psychic toys you have to help solve puzzles or just screw with people. The future vision toy actually has a ton of foreshadowing that you might not catch on a first playthrough.

Episode 1, the Penal Zone, starts off fairly normal but as the season progresses Max’s powers become more and more of a focus. So much so that Episode 4, Beyond the Alley of the Dolls, has you playing as Max far more than Sam. It’s great that our little buddy is getting some much deserved spotlight, after mostly serving as a hint system for the past two seasons, but I do think the mind reading power is the solution to a few too many puzzles. Max being more of the focus works well for the story, but I wouldn’t have minded a bit more inventory fiddling before the finale.

That story is a big part of why The Devil’s Playhouse is my favorite Sam & Max adventure. You wouldn’t think it from a comedy adventure game, but this title goes places. It arguably stretches the pair’s bond farther than Bad Day on the Moon, while still keeping the tone mostly lighthearted. Make no mistake, the game is still squarely focused on the comedy with situations becoming more and more absurd over the season. Each episode is based on a genre of film, like sci-fi, adventure, horror, and more. Episode 3’s noir focus (in the first half, anyway) makes for some of the game’s funniest moments, with Sam interrogating a rat, a gorilla, and a European with uncharacteristic grimness. This section also has a great twist on the dialogue system, with you being able to interrupt characters with threats, accusations, or a private eye monologue. The themes, combined with the deranged antics of the Freelance Police, make you want to use everything on everything else and exhaust every dialogue tree.

The Devil’s Playhouse first released 14 years ago, but this remaster by Skunkape (I still read that as Skun-ka-pe) refreshes the game to look brand new. The art style holds up on its own, but the better lighting and textures look amazing. Even on the Switch version, my sister, who hadn’t even looked at the game since we first played it back in 2010, said this was a huge step up from the original and looked amazing. There are framerate dips that are to be expected nowadays on Nintendo’s aging console, but while the other two seasons were perfectly playable I would hesitate to recommend the portable version of Devil’s Playhouse. Early on in the season, there are some moments in cutscenes where the console has trouble loading the next cut, so the audio skips back a few times to remain synched. Weirdly this doesn’t happen later on, only in the first three episodes. Still, it looks good and plays fine if you have no other choice.

That’s to say nothing of the PC version, where you can really see the love Skunkape put into this remaster. Every texture looks magnificent, the shadows are flawless, and the animations are much-improved over the previous games in the season. It’s also far better than the Switch version, as you can see in the video above, but that’s not a surprise. Obviously the framerate and resolution is commensurate with whatever hardware you have, but just about anything recent is stronger than the Switch, so there will be compromises on that platform that you don’t see on the PC. The Skunkape team did their best to pretty this up, and to great effect, but they did so without breaking the well-established art style. Best of all, it looks great at 4K resolution – something I never thought I’d be able to say about this series.

There is a blemish or two in the visual department unfortunately. Animations are still incredibly stiff and some characters got more love than others. The worst offender is Baby Amelia Earhart, who has an incredibly weird complexion to her face none of the other characters do, with her skin being very light around her eyes and mouth. You can see this in the original release of season 3, but the effect being brought to greater clarity in this remaster looks… off. It’s still overall a great looking remaster, but there are bits that don’t look as good as the rest of the package.

Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse remastered review — HOLY PSYCHIC LAGOMORPHS DANCING THE CAN-CAN ON THE PRECIPICE OF INSANITY, MAX!

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