Sam and Max: The Penal Zone Review

Those Telltale types certainly know style

It’s a brand new year, and Telltale has turned loose a brand new season of everybody’s favourite dog and rabbit crime fighting duo.  The newest addition to the adventure library is entitled Sam and Max: The Devil’s Playhouse, and the first episode The Penal Zone was released mid-April.

My inner-child loves the fact that adventure games are making a slow but steady return to the gaming landscape, but Telltale Games faces the same challenge every time they release a new game: keeping things fresh.  After all, we can gush all we like about a game’s writing and sense of humour, but if it turns out it’s just the same old game repackaged then interest is sure to dwindle.  Even for someone with their nostalgia goggles strapped on as hard as I do.

So it’s nice to see that, with a certain level of respect for the format, Telltale Games has begun to experiment with their usual gameplay style.

From the get go, The Penal Zone aims to show off these new elements.  Our heroes begin the game trapped in a cell by interstellar outlaw General Skun’ka’pe, a militant baboon with dreams of galactic conquest.  To achieve this end he’s scouring Earth for the Toys of Power, objects of terrifying psychic power, two of which just happen to have fallen into Max’s possession.

To make use of these psychic powers, you’ll have to use the first of Penal Zone‘s new features, which is taking Max’s point of view.  This switches the game from Sam’s usual panoramic view to a slightly short first-person view, and brings up a menu of powers for Max to interact with.  The first level provides a short tutorial on these new powers, how they work and what situations you should expect to use them in.  In this episode you’ll have access to both a Future Vision Viewmaster and a Teleporting Toy Phone that can transport Max and whoever he touches to any phone he knows the number of.

A visual tweak there, a polished dialogue wheel there ...

Which leads me to my main issue with The Penal Zone, which is any puzzle the game attempts to give you is automatically negated by using Max’s future vision. Sure, the visions don’t ever explicitly show how any puzzle is solved, but given the game continues the fine LucasArts tradition of no extraneous inventory a solution is never far away. This means future vision is effectively a “win-the-game” button, and to compound the problem the game requires you to use it for half the puzzles. It’s a neat gameplay mechanic, but instead of creating some genuinely challenging time puzzles like we’ve seen in Sam and Max: Chariots of the Dogs, it just ends up as a crutch for the player to lean on.

The game does give you a taste of some powers Max is yet to gain, like metamorphosis and mind-reading, and these look promising from a puzzle standpoint. But since the psychic powers have obviously become the focus of the puzzles here, and for the moment Max is limited to only two, making your way through The Penal Zone is unusually easy.

Keeping this in mind, it also means that The Penal Zone isn’t particularly long. Taking into account the few times I did need to stop and think, it took me around four hours (add 30 minutes if you include making lunch) all up to reach this episode’s completion. It’s not really such a bad running time, when you think about it, but the easy difficulty certainly leaves you wanting more.

The Narrator is good, but no Maurice LaMarche

Lack of challenge aside, the game maintains the excellent level of writing and humour we’ve come to expect. While there seemed to be one too many jokes about where Max keeps his inventory, the rest of the wise-cracks hit the mark consistently. I’m enjoying the game’s new art design, which has shifted ever so slightly from being a noir graphic novel to a circa-1970′s TV show. To this end Telltale have also furnished the game with a black and white, Twilight Zone-esque narrator, something I’m sure they’re going to get more than enough laughs out of by the end of the series.

There have also been a few cosmetic changes to the game’s usual control scheme, most of which were probably made in the interests of making the game more iPad accessible.  Gone is the rather dinky “click-n-drag” movement Tales of Monkey Island used, replaced with an iPhone style press-activated joystick.  Conversations also now summarise dialogue options (ala Mass Effect) instead of displaying a full sentence (ala Dragon Age).  This gives the script a better chance to spring jokes on you, while also allowing the dialogue system to flow a lot easier.

All in all this game is a good start for Telltale Games in the new year. It shows that they’re still thinking of new and original ways to add variety to their games, without breaking the established mold that everyone has come to enjoy. I’m hoping we get an increase in the difficulty next month with The Tomb of Sammun-Mak, but overall it’s a great addition to your adventure revival library.

The Verdict:

Pros: The Penal Zone doesn’t skimp on the laughs, and you’ll be surprised at the amount of restraint shown with the obvious “Penal” jokes. Both Sam and Max have been polished up with some new animations, to accompany their usual, fine voice acting.

Cons: While offering an entertaining new angle on the puzzles, Max’s new foresight usually ruins even the simplest of challenges. While there are a lot of new locations to play around with, it does seem like Telltale is over-recycling a few of their recurring characters. We can only be thankful that the Soda Poppers haven’t turned up yet (although I’ve no doubt they will at some point).

Overall: The Penal Zone creates a good starting point for a new Sam and Max series, but where it’s leading remains to be seen. Still, the quality of the game more than equals the asking price, so any remaining fence-sitters can purchase with confidence.  3 out of 5 stars.