Charming and silly: Sam & Max – The Devil’s Playhouse reviewed

Readers of a certain age (mine, roughly) may have fond memories of 1993’s Sam & Max Hit the Road – a joyously silly and absorbing two-dimensional point-and-click adventure starring the ‘Freelance Police’: a tubby cartoon Irish wolfhound called Sam and his partner Max, a ‘hyperkinetic rabbity thing’ with a propensity for random violence. It was Itchy & Scratchy meets Raymond Chandler, with puzzles to solve and wisecracks to enjoy.

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Point-and-click has gone the way of the abacus, but much of the feel of the original franchise is to be found in this remastered version of the final game in the series. As it opens, our heroes are locked in the brig of a spaceship commanded by General Skun-ka’pe, a megalomaniac space-gorilla in quest of the Toys of Power. There’s a mole-man locked in a terrarium, so you need to use your psychic powers to turn Max into a bazooka and shoot the space-ape into ‘the Penal Zone’ (there’s a smutty pun about this in the dialogue). But all this has happened in the future. And we’re only at the pre-credit sequence…

If this sounds exhaustingly zany, that’s kind of the deal with Sam and Max – who started life as anarchic comic characters. Writing it down flatly like that underplays their peculiar charm and their genre-hopping ways, too. B-movie spoof gives way to Lovecraftian spoof gives way to hard-boiled send-up. You amble about exploring different areas, interact with everything, run through dialogue options and use or combine objects in imaginative and silly ways to progress the story. Readers of a certain age, wearying of space-marines with railguns, will greet that rabbit as an old friend.