The effort to remaster Telltale’s Sam & Max trilogy comes to a close as Skunkape delivers a spruced-up version of its excellent 2010 finale.

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This year has been quite a rollercoaster for remakes and remasters, hasn't it? I mean, had you told me a couple of years ago that KONAMI still had an interest in anything other than pachinko machines, I'd have been quite surprised—even more had you told me their Silent Hill 2 remake would turn out well.

Less surprising, with it being announced nearly four years ago, is the third and final remaster in Telltale’s Sam & Max trilogy. Maybe it's more surprising than I think it is as, despite a dedicated following, it seems to have gone under a lot of people's radars. Another Telltale title tied to someone else’s intellectual property isn't a reason to get excited nowadays, I guess.

But back in 2010? They were kings of the world, or at the very least about to be. The Walking Dead was still a couple of years away; the title that truly put 'em on the map and cemented their eventual downfall as a studio that spent its later years chasing that next, big, licensed hit to replicate its biggest success, all to no avail. The Devil’s Playhouse launched in simpler times, when the most “high-profile” license in Telltale’s hands turned up a couple of CSI games. Those, however, were critically panned and not that big of a deal. The last season of Sam & Max, on the other hand, was.


Telltale took every opportunity to highlight how important this season was by differentiating it from the previous two. In a series of nods to '50s horror and science fiction, the first episode kicks off with narration from an eccentric British gentleman; a horror in its own right. Though he’s no Vampira, he firmly establishes that what’s about to follow is not only as much an episode of The Twilight Zone as it is another Freelance Police adventure, but a fully cohesive, world-altering, five-part narrative. This shift in tone came with changes to the art style as well; a more muted colour palette, moody lighting, sharper character designs with more cinematic camera work and, for the first time, a control scheme that lets you move around with WASD, like in any big game, as opposed to merely clicking around.

Though it comes with all the standard improvements—increased visual fidelity, fine-tuned animations, and cleaned-up audio—the remaster has sanded off some of that uniqueness in favour of consistency across the seasons. What remains intact is another spectacular OST from Jared Emerson-Johnson (this time around moulding his jazzy approach with electronic instrumentation to complement the game's otherworldly atmosphere), changes to the point-and-click formula the series had been following so far and, believe it or not, a more emotionally mature story.

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The Devil’s Playhouse is the most “Sam and Max” game out of ‘em all. Aside from walking around as Sam, picking up items and storing them in his inventory, you’ll be able to freely switch to Max and make use of his newfound psychic abilities; coming across one of the ancient Toys of Power in the season's first episode, it turns out that Max is a particularly gifted psychic and can project his abilities through these toys, allowing him feats like transforming into objects or reading people's minds.

Anyone familiar with point-and-click adventures will immediately realise how useful of a skill set this is—and the season’s villains have taken special note. Everything in The Devil’s Playhouse revolves around these powers; they create the most mechanically robust gameplay loop I’ve seen to date from a game in the genre, but they’re also the centre of the season’s conflict. Aliens, ancient pharaohs, Lovecraftian deities and other freakshows of B-movie cinema all try to get their paws, claws, and slimy appendages on 'em, putting Max directly in danger, and while it isn’t the first time the Freelance Police have been in dangerous situations, it is the first time they’re directly in the bad guys’ crosshairs. That being said, making the toys so prevalent in gameplay causes some issues.


Each of Max’s powers is tied to a specific toy, which essentially means you have a set of items that carry over from episode to episode, all playing a big part in the puzzles’ solutions. That isn't to say that there isn't variety. The first episode, The Penal Zone, follows a format similar to the previous seasons as the duo track down the various toys across New York. Things turn on their head almost immediately after, however, as the second episode, The Tomb of Sammun-Mak, tells its story out of order, letting the player jump forward and backwards in time, gathering clues to piece the series of events together. The fourth and fifth episodes, while again leaning back on the tested and true formula, are a spectacle to behold and carry, perhaps for the first time in the series, genuinely tangible stakes.

The big outlier here is the third episode, They Stole Max’s Brain!. Its opening is quite interesting; Sam can interrogate suspects and make use of the game’s dialogue wheel in ways that wouldn’t be fleshed out until Telltale’s later titles, with interruptions, threats, and choices that determine how the conversation will turn out. It’s perhaps the grittiest episode of ‘em all, showing a side of Sam we haven't seen before, complete with tongue-in-cheek noir-style narration and some corny yet excellent Dirty Harry-esque one-liners. However, the mechanic quickly makes its exit, never to be seen again, with everything past that refreshing introduction being made up of a copy-pasted puzzle in slightly different contexts, where using the same psychic powers is the solution. It's an awful, phoned-in episode in a season I'd otherwise consider the best. Though that overreliance on these powers persists throughout the season, making it the easiest by far, no episode oversteps as the third did; otherwise, the variety in storytelling remains great and the episodic format utilised to its fullest potential, with each episode appropriately upping the ante for the finale.

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While not the series' funniest, the juxtaposed tone allows the writing to be the most heartfelt it's ever been. It's still as irreverent as before and doesn't shy away from lampooning the previous seasons, yet it knows when to dial it back and play up that sentimentality to get to the player. It’s weird saying this about a Sam & Max game, as they're usually lighthearted and rather absurd affairs where, even in the face of apparent danger, the feelings of levity and adventurous excitement never completely fade. Yet, The Devil's Playhouse gets emotional, it gets dramatic, it plays up the fact that this is a finale and delivers an ending that feels like a sendoff; both to these characters and to what was Telltale at the time. Without that context, careful pacing, and an intimate knowledge of the series, the third season could have fallen flat, coming across as forced or edgy. But it didn't.

Without a doubt, The Devil’s Playhouse stands as some of Telltale’s best and most unique work, built out of years of honing the team's skills and an understanding of the series' two main characters. It is that same sentiment that has allowed Skunkape to so wonderfully preserve that work with this remaster.