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Well it was my birthday this past weekend, so it was nice that I had a relaxing and hilarious adventure game to play as I fought off a terrible hangover. The latest episode of Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse, titled The Tomb of Sammun’mak releases today and takes place immediately following the events of the first episode. Again, this is a five part monthly downloadable series for the PC, Mac, Playstation 3 and even the iPad, running for a total of $35 for all 5 episodes. If you haven’t checked out my review of the first episode, you’ll want to do that now, otherwise, let’s see what’s new with The Tomb of Sammun’mak.
Recall at the end of the The Penal Zone, after vanquishing General Skunkape, Sam and Max stumbled upon skeletons that looked a lot like themselves. The Tomb of Sammun’mak opens here and plays out a pretty significantly different story, with the overall theme still related to the Devil’s playhouse. Sam and Max find several reels of old film next to the skeletons that turns out to be footage of their grandparents, Sammus and Maximus on an adventure in Egypt to find and steal the Devil’s toybox.. Upon watching the first reel, Max’s powers kick in and they both get sucked into the film, and you take control of the grandparents. There are several reels of film, each that show events at different times throughout the adventure. The first reel puts you in a theatre to set up the events for the adventure, the second reel places you in the tomb of Sammun’mak, and the third reel is on a train ride home. Everything finally comes together at the end as you eventually find out what the reels of film have to do with the skeletons and of course you’ll have another cliffhanger at the end leading us into next month’s episode. As usual the story is hilarious and loaded with pop culture references, even some funny Dungeons and Dragon’s stuff!
This episode took me about four and a half hours to complete. The puzzles weren’t overly difficult, yet as always extremely entertaining. What’s great is that the game-play mechanics are different than the first episode. This time around, Max has 3 new psychic powers to play with, the ability to hop back and forth through time by switching the reels of film to watch, a can of nuts that sucks Sam and Max into it to hide in, and a ventriloquism doll that can be used to throw Max’s voice onto others. So essentially you’ll begin in one reel of film and solve some puzzles, but then have to jump back and forth between the others to assist you in solving the entire mystery. While there isn’t a large emphasis this episode on using items, you’ll interact a lot with various Mole-men who will place a series of curses on you that you’ll have to utilize to trigger certain events. I actually enjoyed this episode even more than I did the first. The puzzles are just challenging enough to keep you entertained and not hard enough that you get frustrated. The dialog is of course very funny and the design of the levels is very creative.
Like The Penal Zone the graphics and music are great, but this episode specifically had a lot more entertaining characters than the first. The primary antagonist is milk and cookie loving Santa Clause-like Nicholas C Kringle and his platoon of 1950s New Jersey mobster-like elves, all with high pitched hilarious voices. These little bastards are mean but so loveable; you just can’t help but egg them on. You’ll also encounter a crazy family of mole-men trying to make their way to America and even a vampire or two. Of course the voice acting is top notch and likely will have you laughing most of your way through the adventure.
As to be expected, TellTale has given us yet again another great adventure to take part in. The Tomb of Sammun’mak gives us new game-play mechanics to add some variety to our puzzle solving quests and of course butt-loads of clever and hilarious dialog. If you are on the fence about adventure games, you can’t really go wrong with any of TellTale’s products. The latest adventure gives us a wonderful story and leaves us hanging for next month’s episode. What did you guys think of the first episode? Leave your questions and comments below!
