"You crack me up Little Buddy!"

honey wake up new S&M remaster is out

I guess it's only fair to compare remaster of second season to the previous remaster. And I gotta say, it feels even better!
- DeSoto mini-game progress now works better (decals progress is saved properly and you don't have to play episodes in order), that progression checklist is also pretty nice.
- Personally, Bosco's VA perform better than first season. And I don't think it's just because I got used to his new voice.
- Quite a handful of areas got revamped with new decor and actual lighting. New lighting is especially nice to look at in zombie factory and night time streets. Pleasant references for true S&M fans sprinkled everywhere.
- Nipple keyring is back.
- Most obscene (and therefore hilarious) original jokes didn't get cut so I assume nothing else got cut too (as promised by Skunkape devs)
- New music is really great! And don't worry, you'll get to hear all original compositions too!
- I didn't notice at first, but I'm glad they added skip button for closing credits so you can see original post-credits scenes!
- And I also gotta thank Skunkape Games for letting me beta test the game and report various bugs and oddities. Thought I was dreaming when I was first offered to volunteer. Honored to help such a chill, responsive and positive crew with polishing my most favorite game series!

i thik they should kiss

Everything Sam & Max is there, but I still do not enjoy the new voice for Bosco, it just doesn't quite fit the middle aged mad man store owner.

Originally released back in late 2007 through 2008, Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space is the second season in Telltale’s trilogy starring the beloved, somewhat niche, crime-solving duo.

For a little more than a year now, it has been available with a fresh coat of paint, exceptionally remastered by Skunkape Games, a team founded by ex-Telltale developers back when the you-know-what hit the fan at the ol’ office. Skunkape has since been the home of the six-foot, fedora-wearing dog and his "hyperkinetic rabbity thing" buddy, and it is thanks to their hard work that the duo’s worst adventure can now be enjoyed on modern systems, with improved visuals, audio, and an updated soundtrack.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2968972173

Hold up! "Worst adventure" yet a positive review? Look, If you’ve got four games in a series, it only follows that one of them has to be the worst. It's just that you can’t pin it on the original LucasArts darling that gave these two their first time in the spotlight, and it can’t be the game that brought ‘em back, nor the dramatic sendoff. Therefore, the title of “worst” has to fall in the middle, even if the game to bear it is quite alright. But I've got gripes!


The second season follows the freelance police on their most colourful journey of ‘em all. Through five episodes, each with its own outlandish location and bizarre villain, you’ll be battling (pointing & clicking through puzzles until the credits roll) the supernatural, urban legends, and none other than Santa himself.

It’s going to be a bit hard to take a step back and evaluate Beyond Time and Space on its own merits when it so clearly wasn’t designed for newcomers to the franchise. Usually, the cases Fido and his lagomorph pal take on are one-offs; standalone stories without explicit continuity between ‘em. You don’t need an overarching plot hanging above the entire series for good seasonal storytelling, yet Season Two picks up a couple of background tidbits from Save the World (Season One), cranks ‘em up into a proper plot, and rounds off some fan-favourite characters. In that sense, it’s quite bold to try and build something new and cool off of what was left over from the previous game. The execution here is narratively satisfying, yet it lets the past have too much hold over everything new, to the point where it feels conflicting.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2968972913

Point & click adventures live and die by the writing, but more often than not, they die by repetition.

Beyond Time and Space offers a lot to appreciate. Its writing is as biting as ever, surprisingly relevant, and most importantly, unrelentingly hilarious. It's a more cohesive whole than Save the World, making it all the more suitable for a solid binge. Still, “is repetitive” is a recurring item on the “Cons” lists of almost every review of a game from this genre written since the dawn of time. Save the World was served those same complaints when it was released, but managed to rise above ‘em because of how fresh it was.

Even with all the new bits showing that Beyond Time and Space has more than enough ideas to be its own thing and keeping in mind that its story is building up on Save the World's foundation, there are still so many reused characters and locations that are hard to take in earnest. Almost every time something from Season One comes back around, it feels like a cost-cutting technique, rather than necessary continuity in a trilogy of games. Even worse, the centrepiece puzzle of every episode follows the same pattern, including a repeating, ridiculously easy minigame. Anyone who thought Telltale started abusing tried-and-true methods only after The Walking Dead is in for a surprise.

To someone who’s hooked on the storyline connecting these two seasons, getting over the cardinal sin of point-&-click adventure games that’s been committed here might not be a tall order. The same goes for Sam & Max fans, especially those who’ve gone through the necessary hours of bludgeoning yourself with a hammer to be on board with this kind of humour. However, they might be turned off for different reasons, depending on how intimately familiar they are with what makes these characters work.


The world these characters inhabit is one of finely-balanced absurdity. Everything goes. Animals are anthropomorphized, store owners sell mundane items for billions of dollars, giant stone statues run for the presidential office, cockroaches serve in the military, self-help gurus build bases on the Moon, wars erupt over forgotten birthdays… Yet, it’s paced and delivered in a manner that never feels overbearing or incoherent.

Beyond Time and Space leans a tad too hard into that absurdity and puts the pedal to the metal until you’re desensitised. It becomes farcical; as if whoever's in the writer's chair is just thinking up ludicrous scenarios with little regard to anything else. Travelling to the Easter Islands, where Amelia Earhart has been kicking it back with DB Cooper ever since the two had disappeared seems a lot less clever when the previous episode had you drive over to the North Pole to deal with a rogue Santa Claus. Following that up with an episode where you battle disco-dancing zombies in an old German castle turned night club seems like a downgrade. I don’t want to go “Ah, okay, right, that makes sense—I’m playing a Sam & Max game”, but rather “Oh, that’s right, this is a Sam & Max game!” when weird things happen.

Aside from the sharp writing style, this is where most of the humour comes from. The slight disconnect is needed to make the game work as the satire that it is. The joke isn’t that Sam & Max are doing all these weird things, it’s that they’re doing them within the logic of a point & click adventure game, where MacGyvering it goes unquestioned. You’re not supposed to accept it, even when making sense of it is necessary for the solution of most puzzles, but rather laugh, ponder, or flinch from the downright cruelty it usually implies when it comes along.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2969073378

My dislike of the tone is passed on to the soundtrack, a lot of which is rearrangements of tracks from the previous season, to go along with those same old locations you’ll be revisiting.

While new music was again contributed as part of the remaster by the original composer and legend that is Jared Emerson-Johnson, neither it nor the rest is as memorable or catchy as what was in Save the World. The silver lining is that it still makes for some enjoyable jazz, except for the quietly mixed title track that has just a tad too much nervous energy, with its bongo beat and sudden blares of trumpets. Even the dark and gritty third season had the guts to include something fun, like a theremin!


An ambivalent tug of war that pulls strong enough in neither direction, Beyond Time and Space travels between past and present so much it ends up in a chaotic loop, eventually spat out somewhere in the middle of the road—six outta ten, five on a bad day. With three whole other games in the same series, each offering a better experience, it wouldn’t be hard to pass up were it not part of a trilogy and a well-written bout regardless.

Speaking of the trilogy, the third season should be getting its remaster at some point this year, and I’d much rather we go out with a bang rather than a whimper. Just thinking about it gets me all tingly, or maybe that’s the intracranial hematoma from all the hammer blows acting up.

A curator helmed by veterans of the review scene, Summit regularly provides you with professional quality reviews for all sorts of games.

Even after playing the first episode, I can safely say that the future of Sam & Max is bright!
The visuals: stunning
The music: toe-tapping
The jokes: still hilarious
And I think Oogie Banks is really fitting into the role as Bosco -the year in between games did wonders for him :)

A step up from the first remaster which I also loved to bits! So yeah, the future of Sam & Max is in good hands :D now we eagerly await the Devil's Playhouse Remastered, and then.... who knows what will come next?

A great game to put your braincells to the test while simultaneously killing them

"Boobies."
- Max, circa 2007

I am ready for season 3 now pls