Historically speaking, the genre of graphic adventures has as direct synonyms “made in Sierra” and “made in LucasArts”. Speaking of the latter, the historic production house, closed in 2011, represented the launch pad – and also the pinnacle – of some titles that have become cornerstones and standard-bearers of the genre: just think of course of The Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle. The studio also gave birth to the series of Sam & Maxalthough the IP later passed into the hands of Telltalewho took care of the other games.
To be precise, the series is composed of three large chapters that, within them, contain a varied number of adventures. The title we are going to review today, The Devil’s Playhouseis in fact the last chapter ever published in the series, which groups together a series of short adventures by Telltale Games.
Launched on the market in 2010, the title is now re-proposed in remastered version and correct from the point of view technician. the version that we are going to illustrate to you now is the one proposed on Nintendo Switch.
The detective duo is back!
As we said at the beginning, this chapter of Sam & Max is also made up of a series of little adventures loosely connected to each other. Without wanting to go into the details of the brief plot of each of them, in order to avoid spoilers, we can simply state that with humorous and – in some ways – parodistic intentions, the title manages to clearly show the spirit of the series, and to bring to its peak the type of humor that the series has always tried to propose.
The story continues in fact between dialogues and strange situationsbut never so “excessive” as not to be entertaining: let’s be clear, you will necessarily have to chew a bit of English to better grasp the jokes and comic nuances (the Italian language is not available, unfortunately not even with subtitles) but we are certainly not talking about plots and structures that are so difficult to understand.
With the introduction of the third dimension, which strongly differentiates the title from the original chapter “Hit the Road”, the gameplay of Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse Remastered suffers from the merits and, above all, of the defects old-fashioned point-and-click adventures in 3D style (that Escape from Monkey Islandin this sense, is a valid yardstick).
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By controlling the two characters (at alternating times) within three-dimensional game areas, we find the presence of a camera and a movement system not very intuitive, slow and not particularly precise. The feature that made this title special, and the Sam & Max series in general, is the possibility of interchange the two main characters: on the one hand, we have Sam who represents the traditional character of the point and click genre, while Max represents the keystone, as we will control him through the activation of his powers.
During both gameplay phases, two defects in the character management clearly emerge: the lack of clarity and the woodiness. The Nintendo Switch version of the title, which doesn’t make extensive use of the touchscreen, makes selecting a scene element rather unnerving and imprecise.
A technical adaptation
In essence, however, what we are doing is a review of a remastered: well let’s ask ourselves, what differentiates this product from the 2010 adventure?
With a focus mainly on technical refinement, The Devil’s Playhouse Remastered aim and succeed successfully at fix bug related issues graphics (and not only) that afflicted the original product.
Furthermore, the title features a good quality graphic reconstruction that allowed us to better appreciate the contents: lights, colors And depth they have never been like this well calibrated in the previous chapters of the series.
Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse it is, on a narrative and interpretative level, one of the most successful adventures of the series and, above all from a purely technical point of view, the necessary remastering work was successful. A streamlining of the more difficult mechanics that characterize a given branch of 3D graphic adventures, however, would not have been a bad thing.
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