Written by: Chris W.

 

 

 

On Xbox Live Arcade, the first season of Sam & Max (Save the World) was irresistibly priced, and is one of the best gaming bargains that you could ever buy.

 

Fortunately and sensibly enough, the five games of this second season (Sam & Max: Beyond Time And Space) have also been bundled together and priced at the sum of 1600 Microsoft Points on Xbox Live Arcade. Indeed, it’s another gaming bargain from those generous souls at Telltale Games.

 

Obviously, those who played and completed the entirety of the first season will find this second one to be more rewarding than those who haven't. Whilst these five adventure games have their separate stories to follow, it’s still best to play them if you’ve already played the first, as jokes and story threads are carried over, meaning you’ll only really get the gist of certain things if you have prior knowledge of the previous season.

 

The five episodes of Beyond Time and Space sees the comedic duo of dog Sam and his “little buddy” Max the rabbity thing getting up to all sorts of time travelling, hell visiting, and dimensional travelling. It’s also sensible to play them in the very order that they appear on the episode select screen as you'll recognise references to other episodes, whilst some even begin where the prior one left off.

 

 

All the games are very amusing, with fantastic voice acting, amazingly silly scripts, and the characters of Sam & Max play off one another fantastically well: Sam being the slightly more sensible of the two, whilst Max is one warped bunny who just so happens to think that violence is the answer to everything. There are some really smart jokes to be found throughout and it’s regularly so silly that I just couldn’t help myself from laughing at the ridiculousness of it all.

 

Being an adventure game, there’s obviously plenty of puzzles to be found in each individual episode. Puzzles differ in their difficulty: some are really obvious in their solutions and others not so much, requiring plenty of brain power, experimentation and perhaps the occasional walkthrough.

 

But, it has to be said that the puzzles may generally prove to be not difficult for those who have been weaned on adventure games. There’s no item combining or anything like that, although many of the puzzles aren’t cakewalks, either.

 

 

The games vary in the number of locations that you’ll visit (obviously never a vast amount), though what they all have in common is that you’ll be jumping back and forth: finding items, with solutions to puzzles then becoming clearer.