Well,
judgment day is finally here, Sam & Max Season 3
fans, in more ways than one. The latest and last installment of The
Devil’s Playhouse has pulled into your friendly neighborhood
Telltale multiplex. And it is indeed bigger and bolder than the four
earlier movies — uh, sorry, I mean games.

As
you may recall, Episode
4 ended with a mutant gigantizoid Max stomping away from Liberty
Island toward lower Manhattan. Now, when Episode 5 begins, the monstrous
Max has been terrorizing the city for over a week. Crushing all in
his path, and putting any survivors into a sinister deep sleep with
his myriad Max spores — flaming Max heads which float around
like demon sandmen trying to bore all comers to sleep. Luckily for
Gotham, our remaining heroes are a wide-awake bunch. And though Sam
may be sans his usual sidekick, he has pretty much every other character
who has appeared in the season back on his side. Plus a bunch of returnees
from earlier seasons, including a very preggers Sybil.

Here’s
the situation straight from the Situation Room: Acting president Agent
Superball is preparing to nuke the rampaging Max (and, somewhat regrettably,
the rest of the city), unless Sam, and you, and about six dozen other
characters can figure out how to turn Max back into an adorable bunny.
The action is fast and furious as Sam and his crack team prepare to
enter Max’s digestive system and then race against the clock
to de-monsterfy him. Safe to say, the path to success is not quite
that simple, as there are more twists and turns in the plot ahead
than there are in Monster Max’s large intestine. Even worse,
there’s an unknown traitor on the prowl, plotting to undo any
progress our heroes make.

You
will have your sweaty hands full as you — ah, the heck with
it. There’s only so much of that faux tension mode I can take.

The City That Dares
Not Sleep is really one long, frenetic cakewalk. I don’t
think I took a wrong turn the entire way. The atmosphere is all seat-of-your-pants
crisis, but the actual gameplay, as per usual, is easy as pie. I suppose
this is an accomplishment of sorts, to make the player feel like he
or she is under the gun, when really nothing is at stake. The strange
thing about adventure games, once upon a time at least, is there was
something at stake. Amid all the fantasy and other shenanigans, there
was a genuine tension to playing an adventure
— you might not finish. Unless you cheated, of course. Suppose
when you go to your real local multiplex this weekend to take in one
of Hollywood’s finest there was a chance, if you didn’t
pay sufficient attention, you would not see the end of the movie?
Well, thank heaven, Telltale has eliminated that suspense. Thanks
to their simplistic gameplay, generous hints and limited inventory,
you would have to actually be asleep not to breeze through a game
like this.

To
their credit, these Sam & Max games, like most Telltale offerings,
do indeed have near Hollywood level production values. The
City That Dares Not Sleep looks and sounds, if possible,
even better than the four earlier episodes. With Max out of the picture,
so to speak, there are no more psi powers to play with, but Sam does
get to do some astral self-projection in order to solve one series
of obstacles. At another point he even dances a mean Roomba. You also
get to control Monster Max as he stomps around Gotham’s streets.
The plotting and dialog are as crisp as ever. The sound and score
are as lush. The jokes are just as sly and pop-cultural. It’s
yet another beautiful, expert, fun product. But is it a game? Debatable.
It makes me wonder why Telltale doesn’t just go ahead and make
movies. Give Pixar a run for its money. If the bottom line is all
that matters and far more people prefer to watch movies than play
games, why bother to retain any game elements at all? Is it just for
nostalgia?

There’s
a point in City where the writers seem to be poking fun even at this
question. In a cluttered basement room of Monster Max’s lower
extremities, Sam stumbles upon a shelf of memorabilia from the original
LucasArts Sam & Max Hit the Road. Self-referential wisecracks
ensue. It’s a funny scene, but begs the question sarcasm or
not. Are the Telltale Sam & Maxes superior to the lone LucasArts
game? Many people consider
S&M Hit the Road the greatest adventure game
ever made. I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s surely in
the top ten. It may be in 256 colors and not glorious 3D, but it has
puzzles as clever as its dialog. Yes, Telltale, puzzles, incredible
as it sounds, can be fun. They’re not something that stops the
player from getting to the good stuff — they are the good stuff.

The
City That Dares Not Sleep is certainly the second best entry
in Season 3 (The
Tomb of Sammun-Mak remains the clear standout). TCTDNS
richly deserves the A minus I’m awarding it. If they ever do
make a film of it, and finally get rid of the last of those pesky
puzzles, I’ll probably grade that even higher.

It’s
time to assess the whole of Sam & Max Season 3.
It was, from start to finish, a very enjoyable romp. Episodes two
and five were, as I say, the best, but even the treading-water third
and fourth
episodes were highly entertaining. We welcomed some ingenious new
elements, like Max’s psi powers and Sam’s rolled-up-sleeves
interrogations. There was also the dabbling in places of “real”
emotion, as Max’s fate hung in the balance up to the very end.
(Just wait, you’ll see.) Again, the only negative of the entire
series would be, for puzzle diehards like myself, the lack of any
serious challenge. Overall, I give The Devil’s Playhouse
a B plus.

PC System Requirements:

• Operating system: Windows
  XP / Vista / Windows 7
• Processor: 2.0 GHz +
  (3 GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent rec.)
• Memory: 1GB
• Sound: DirectX 8.1 sound
  device
• Video: 128MB DirectX
  8.1-compliant video card (256MB rec.)
• DirectX: Version 9.0c
  or better

Mac System Requirements:

• Operating system: Mac
  OS X 10.5 or newer
• Processor: Intel Core
  2 Duo processor
• Not Recommended For
  Macs with integrated graphics