Sam and Max: Culture Shock by Telltale Games

This is a repeat play through, so not out of the backlog. Sometimes you just need to take a break from the new stuff and have a good ol’ hit of something familiar.

Sam and Max: Culture Shock is the first episode of the first “season” of Sam and Max games by Telltale Games. It’s a short adventure game that follows the exploits of Sam and Max, freelance police, as they deal with a number of former childhood actors running amok in their neighbourhood.

Now, there may be a lot of terms and names in the above mini paragraph that needs clarification for some, and for others, you can just jump right on down to the next little blurb. So, for those that want more of an explanation, here we go. Adventure games in general are games that are almost always story driven, (or in some cases, exploration driven, such as Zork), where the player controls a character, (or is the character), that moves through the narrative by overcoming obstacles in the form of puzzles. Most of these puzzles require using items picked up throughout the course of the adventure to solve them, or by selecting the proper dialogue choices to get another character to do what is needed. As such, adventure games mostly require a player to listen/read a story and then traverse the game world picking up random objects to solve the problems placed in front of the character. It should also be mentioned that the genre is known for puzzles that occasionally expects unreasonable leaps in logic (or un-logic), and getting into the heads of the developers more than doing what would make sense to you. Telltale Games mostly specializes in making these types of games, (I can’t speak for there more recent games, which seem to be straying away from pure adventure gaming at least a little bit), and they make them in an episodic format. Basically, they announce a season worth (four to six) episodes, and release one a month, each episode being a short, (2 to 4 hour), self-contained story but part of a greater whole. One of their earlier attempts was season one of Sam and Max, which was based off of the comics done by Steve Purcell, (now at Pixar, working in story development), about an anthropomorphic dog named Sam and his sidekick Max (a psychotic rabbit-y thing). His original comics inspired a short lived cartoon and one previous videogame by LucasArts that was released in the nineties. 

Okay, so we covered that. So, why would someone want to play this game? For the simple reason that it will make you continually laugh. If the idea of freelance police isn’t funny enough, and you don’t get a kick out of thinking about psychotic rabbit-y things there are still reasons to like this game. Its biggest strength is that it is well written. The whole thing is spot on, from the overarching plot down to the individual lines spouted by our heroes. The wit is high in this game, and yet it doesn’t feel like just a bunch of individual jokes strung along to make it look like a story. The game starts in the office of Sam and Max, who are just killing time when the phone rings, offering to relieve the boredom by presenting them with a case. However, their phone has gone missing, and is being held for cheesy ransom by a rat, Jimmy Two Teeth. From there, we discover former childhood stars who are under the influence of hypnosis to do the bidding of a shadowy figure. Then there is a climax. Okay, so it sounds pretty strung along haphazardly, but it’s not, or at least it makes sense within the world of Sam and Max. What is a credit to the writing is that you accept Sam and Max’s universe and understand that the plot isn’t deranged when presented within the confines of that structure.

Culture Shock is a great introduction to the world of Sam and Max. It captures many of the elements that made all of the previous Sam and Max stories so great; witty and gut splitting one-liners, wanton mischief and comical violence are presented in a way that somehow suggests whimsical innocence instead of depravity. These are, in my opinion, hallmarks of Sam and Max.  The best part of all is that this episode is so small compared to the grandiose absurdity that the series eventually builds into. The fact that you can enjoy it just as much playing through a second time, knowing that bigger and bigger things are coming is a testament to what Telltale created with these games. 

Oh! Here is a video you can watch to see a bit of what I'm rambling on about. It's the trailer released from way back before the game came out. It's full of those witty lines I was going on about, so worth a watch: