Sam & Max Season 2

The familiarity of the characters and locations has made the comedy richer, with each episode adding yet more layers to the surreal stories and sight gags, but the puzzles are poorer for all the repetition. When progress relies yet again on Sybil's love life, or Stinky's recipe, experience of prior episodes can't help but nudge you in the right direction. The finale of episode five is almost ridiculously simple, taking place in an artificially truncated environment where the sequence of events needed for completion is all but spelled out for you. Anyone playing the season from beginning to end as a single experience will find a curious cyclical pace to the thing, with no real build-up in gameplay to match the end of the story.

And yet, looking back over the season, I really find myself torn. I've enjoyed every episode for its writing, and often laughed out loud along the way. As an avowed fan of great writing in games, I want to smother Telltale in kisses for delivering rich character work and genuine laughs in a medium that usually shuns depth and kills comic timing stone dead. Yet at the same time I've become increasingly disillusioned with the game elements, and with the story complete I haven't got the usual thrill I get from beating a game. Clicking through many of the puzzles felt more like a rudimentary task to earn the next joke rather than an end in itself, and that's not good.

Ultimately, this is a fault that lies with point-and-click in general, not just Sam & Max. I single them out only because their world is so rewarding otherwise, that the inherited restrictions of the genre chafe all the more. Put simply, point-and-click adventure games are at an evolutionary crossroads. The genre is, against the odds, staging a comeback of sorts - helped by increasingly popular digital distribution and platforms like the DS and Wii reminding gamers that twin-sticks and fire buttons aren't the only control methods a game can use. Yet clearly the arcane puzzles of old aren't going to cut it these days, any more than a modern platform game can afford to leave players battling for days to get past one screen.

Is the solution, as Sam & Max seem to suggest, to make the answers more apparent so that players can progress with the story more quickly? I don't have a problem with that, in theory, but I feel there's an important distinction between making puzzles logical and making them obvious. Make these worlds more interactive. Allow different solutions to the same puzzle, by making the solution a matter of meeting various criteria rather than a fixed combination of items in sequence. Encourage players to think laterally rather than the linear model currently in use.

Is such a thing possible in the bite-sized chunks of an episodic game? Probably not, and my out-loud ruminations shouldn't detract from the fact that Sam & Max Season 2 still offers a thoroughly enjoyable adventure, provided you value jokes over puzzles. I love these characters, and I love Telltale's ambition for finding new ways to deliver classic gameplay. One day, the point-and-click genre will find a way to embrace the future while holding on to the heritage of the past, and I honestly hope that Sam & Max Season 3 will be one of the first steps along that road.

7/10