A great game that was remastered with great care. Really well done although I prefer the older-school dialogue controls from the previous two, but you get used to it quickly. A great climax and great ending to the trilogy!

The game is certainly the best mechanically, but the remaster leaves something to be desired, particularly as it seems to introduce some bugs and it looks a bit worse. The plot is more coherent, but ironically it seems that the writing suffered for it.

AUDIOVISUAL

The lighting has downgraded somewhat, not in its technical aspects but just in how it is used. The old version had a gritty look that fit its tone and what it was parodying better, and you can see some elements of that retained in the remaster, such as the font. The previous games' "comic" font is used for highlighted objects, however, which doesn't work too well with the rest of the style. There is also a new font used for highlighted "Max vision" objects, which actually fits quite well.

The most notable thing about the visuals is that Max is much more expressive than the prior two games, which is jarring, but certainly an improvement.

TECHNICAL

The game has a flaw I have never seen in any game prior: your computer can enter sleep mode while a cutscene is playing. This would not be such an issue if it were not for the fact that when the computer wakes up, the cutscene is frozen for a considerable amount of time. The game also seems to have trouble going from lengthy cutscenes to gameplay, again freezing when this occurs. I don't recall any other bugs.

GAMEPLAY

What chiefly distinguishes this game from the prior ones is the "Max vision" with the psychic abilities. That's interesting and implemented well; switching is quite seamless, though the first-person controls are a bit disorienting, and the psychic puzzles are decently challenging, though most of the ones that involve mind reading or "future vision" are very easy, especially since if you are like me and use the two on literally everything to see the gags.

The more subtle improvement to the structure of the game is that each episode features a unique puzzle gimmick. Episode 1 revolves around the usage of "future vision," 2 features a pseudo-time-travel mechanic, 3 focuses on shapeshifting, 4 mainly uses teleportation, and 5 is something else, to put it plainly and without spoilers. It's a far more coherent structure than the previous two games without being repetitive. The game is also good at focusing on a particular kind of puzzle for a period of time, such as episode 3, which has a special puzzle involving the dialogue wheel.

PLOT

The game, in sharp contrast to the prior two installments, has an actual coherent plot. It even has a narrator. The plot is mostly a pastiche of Lovecraft, the Twilight Zone, and other bits and bobs of horror. This means that much of the writing is narrowly tailored around that, so punchlines are less free-flowing. It feels at times, though, that the game does not take full advantage of the humor in the scenarios it presents and uses cliches too much. There were, by my memory, multiple jokes with the general format "[X] is crazy, but [Y that exists in the game] is normal." There was also a bit more gross-out humor. It sticks out that the game presents at least two scenarios involving human-nonhuman intimate relations.

Good.