The first episode of this season of Sam & Max should be viewed as a warm-up lap, that said the game seems to have broken into a full out sprint of quality that may end up being one of the best adventure games ever. The second episode finds the two freelance police (think cops without any real legal authority that still carry guns) reliving the past adventures of their great-grandparents, in movie form, and out of order.
Without a doubt the most interesting part of the game is how the story is told in chunks, each part being placed on a different film reel. Max, the cute rabbit thing with fangs and an urge to kill, gains the power to project Sam and himself into their relatives’ past while the movie plays. This leads to a series of interesting puzzles that make the entire experience non-linear, basically making it so a part of the end of the story must be played first to gain the solution to something that happened earlier.
This mechanic may sound complicated, and truth be told it does take some time to get the hang of, but it causes the game to have one of the most –what I assume is– realistic feeling time travel experiences I have yet played in a game. Normally most games time travel ends up feeling like a copy of a level but with more does, The Tomb of Sammun-Mak has done something entirely different. When traveling through time the only thing carried to another time is the knowledge of events, past or future, so the player is experiencing chunks of the game before inventory items are available or character alliances are formed.
Normally this series has had stand out voice acting, this episode goes out of its way to make it seem like previous entries where forgettable at best. The performances given all around this time are by far one of the best from this crew. Even though most of the cast returns from previous seasons it feels like they have finally fallen into a comfortable place with their characters, almost like going back and watching earlier episodes of the Simpsons and realize how much the cast has improved.
The real concerns about the game are pretty much the same as they have been in previous versions, an odd pricing system, small parts of gameplay that require the player to use every object on every other object just to figure puzzles out, and new for this time around small spots of load time that seem to be scattered liberally throughout the game. The series has come out one episode a month until a story has concluded since the start, but now the pricing requires people to buy the entire season at the start. This is fine as it allows there to be a more consistent experience for an entire season, but the way that the game is designed I am growing more and more concerned that playing it all at once may cause some burn out on the game.
Most of the issues with the game are rather small and can be easily ignored, like the load times throughout that could simply be patched out later. The Tomb of Sammun-Mak is simply one of the most enjoyable adventure games that has come out in recent memory, and is a very easy recommend to anyone with a computer. Keep in mind that this is only the second episode in a series and it alone makes the season worth the asking price.
Not As Good As: Having weird psychic powers
Also Try: Season 2
Wait For It: A box set of the first three seasons
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