Sam & Max: This Time It’s Virtual review: a fun and variated game
On July 8th, Sam & Max: This Time It’s Virtual, one of the most awaited VR games of 2021, will be released on Oculus Quest (you can wishlist it here). It is the re-proposition of the famous duo Sam & Max, that was very popular in the 90s, but this time in a completely different format, that is a VR game. Is this game good? Will it please its fans? How does it compare with old Sam & Max games? Discover the answer to these questions in today’s big review!
Sam & Max: This Time It’s Virtual video review
Here you are my usual video review of the game, together with some minutes of initial gameplay. Have fun watching it, or keep reading for the usual detailed written review! Down the article, I have also embedded a video with 30 minutes of gameplay without commentary, if you are interested…
Sam & Max: This Time It’s Virtual
If you, like me, already played computer games in the 80-90s, for sure you remember the point-and-click adventures genre. Titles like Monkey Island, Sam & Max, Maniac Mansion, Indiana Jones have made the history of video games, and people of my generation have very fond memories of them.
If you are too young to remember, well, let me tell you that it was a genre of games in 2.5D where you controlled a character that lived some kind of adventure with a nice story. To make the story go on, you had to solve some puzzles and to do that you had also to talk with many NPCs through scripted dialogues. All the interactions happened by pointing and clicking on elements with your mouse, hence the name of the genre. The conundrums were sometimes very frustrating, and it was not uncommon to spend hours trying to understand how to solve 2 or 3 enigmas of the game, to find in the end that the solution was utter nonsense (I still remember when I had to use a monkey to activate a fountain… WTF). But what made the games so beloved were usually the funny characters and the dialogues full of jokes, puns, and a bit of foolish nonsense. The most famous company that made these games was LucasArts, which was called this way because it had been funded by George Lucas. Sam & Max were probably the most iconic duo of this kind of adventures and their jokes were incredibly funny.
This game genre is not popular anymore, and given the fact that LucasArts has been acquired by Disney, it is highly improbable that we’ll see a new title coming soon. But Michael Levine, who has worked at LucasArts and now is the CEO of HappyGiant, has decided to give all fans of the genre an enormous joy by porting Sam&Max into virtual reality. He could do that because Sam&Max is the only IP of those epic games that doesn’t belong to Disney: so he called back the most important people that worked on the original title (Steve Purcell, Mike Stemmle, Peter Chan, etc…) and a new development team to give a new life to this duo of funny detectives. The idea was to create a new game with Sam & Max, that exploited a new technology and could appeal to a new audience, but that remained authentic with the old saga.
This is how Sam & Max: This Time It’s Virtual has born. You can listen to the full story in this exclusive interview with Mike Levine that I have made some months ago.
I have already played the full game, and I’m ready to give you my impressions. But before starting, let me just warn you of two things. The first is that there will be light spoilers. I won’t spoil the plot or important details, but of course, to talk about the game, I will reveal some details here and there. The second is that I will completely be biased because I just love Sam & Max and I also love Happy Giant 🙂
That said… let’s go!
Story
Without spoiling too many things, I can say to you that the story starts with Sam & Max that get to find you, and since they always need help for their private corp of the Freelance Police, they propose you become a new cadet in their prestigious institution. Of course, you will have to undergo some training, and soon you will have to use what you have learned to fight evil forces…
The story of the game is full of nonsense, in true Sam & Max style: just saying… your training happens in “an abandoned amusement park which was created decades ago by a brilliant inventor who believed tardigrades (the microscopic creatures) could be the future of children’s entertainment, and turns out he was very wrong“. I mean… how could you not love the humor of this experience?
Gameplay
The gameplay of Sam & Max reminds a bit the one of the old point-and-click adventures: there is a story and to make it unfold, you have to talk with people and solve enigmas. But actually, it is also much more than that. Happy Giant has not tried to simply transpose the point-and-click adventure genre to VR, but it has created a new VR genre inspired by that. Personally, I think this has been a wise choice because otherwise, the risk would have been to create a VR game that would have been weird or boring to play in VR. 2D games belong to 2D screens, VR users need something else.
But defyining exactly how is the gameplay is a bit complicated. This is not a game with one or two mechanics that you repeat continuously (e.g. slashing cubes in Beat Saber, or solving enigmas in a brain training game), but it is one inside which you have to perform many things. Since you are a member of the Freelance Police, you have to do everything a policeman has to do: move around the city, solve cues, defuse bombs, throw grenades, climb on walls and ladders, collect cues, solve enigmas, talk with people, etc… I am not joking, you have to do all this stuff while playing! Even if the game is full of nonsense, I can say that this choice is actually full of sense: you are a policeman, and you have to do everything that a policeman has to do during his duty. You will find yourself in places where there are situations that you have to solve somehow, and as soon as you solve one scenario, you enter the next one, where there are other problems you have to cope with.
This decision by the authors is crucial for the gameplay and takes with it important pros and cons. The biggest con is that you have to be trained to perform all these actions. This means that the game needs a long tutorial, and even if the authors have handled this problem brilliantly, this still hampers the overall fun of the game.
As soon as you are recruited by Sam & Max, they invite you to their office, and there you have to perform some simple tasks, that are clearly meant to teach you the basic mechanics of the game: grabbing, throwing, talking with people, shooting, interacting with objects. Then they take you to the abandoned amusement park where they train you in performing more complicated actions through nine modified attractions. Here they teach you for instance defusing bombs, climbing, finding cues, shooting with different weapons, etc… Every one of these attractions is like a game in the game: one is an escape room, another a course with various challenges like in a carnival, another one is like baseball, etc… They are very variated and nice to play, some of them are also a bit hectic. In the end, when you finish each attraction, you get a final grade from A to F, so, if you want, you can still play it again to get a higher grade (this is a smart gamification mechanic). It is cool that instead of giving you a boring long tutorial, you have actually many mini-games that teach you how to interact with this title!
This training has been designed very well, BUT I still found it a bit boring. I had no purpose in doing those actions, which were absolutely not part of the story… I was just doing them because the game required me to do them. They were not that bad, don’t misunderstand me, but I clearly got I was doing some kind of training, and doing 1 + 9 training sessions was a bit too much for my tastes. Not considering the fact that having been in the VR space for 7 years, I don’t need that a game teaches me how to climb a wall, or grab an object, or throw something. They were minigames, even nice ones, but I didn’t feel committed to doing them. The gamification was not working with me either: even if I got an F I absolutely didn’t care, because I just wanted to finish that stuff to enter the real action. Honestly, when I started the game the first time and I played the first training in the office, plus the first three training sessions, I thought: “Is Sam & Max just this? A collection of mini games?”
Luckily the answer is no. After the first three training attractions, the story starts unfolding and you finally start working as a member of the Freelance Police, going around finding cues, talking with people, shooting at bad guys, defusing bombs, etc… And when that part begins, the true game begins. You have just to be a little patient. The game starts with lots of dialogues and a lot of training, but then finally you can have true fun. I won’t spoil what happens, but I can tell you that you’ll have to do many things, and there is an interesting story to follow. And that story, of course, is full of funny nonsense.
After this first segment, you are back to three training sessions, then there is another part of the story, then another training session, and then in the end you have a big chunk of the true game. In total there are 17 levels in the game.
One of the cool things about Sam & Max is that you never know what is going to happen next: the story is so absurd that is unpredictable, the characters are so fun that you can’t imagine what joke is coming next, and the gameplay is so variated that you don’t know what is the action that you will be required to perform next. It’s a continuous surprise in everything. And the good of having introduced so many mechanics is that it is always new and refreshing. It is not a game a la Beat Saber when you do always the same thing: here the gameplay is so various, you do always different stuff, and this is fun. I was afraid it could be confusing, but actually, also thanks to the long tutorial, it is not. In fact, one of the advantages of the long (and a bit boring) tutorial is that the game completely guides you in everything, and it teaches you all the mechanics in a simple way, so that everyone, even VR newbies, can learn that easily. This is a game for everyone, not just the VR pros: probably one of the reasons why I have found it boring in the beginning is because I already know how to climb and move in VR… while someone that has just bought a Quest truly needs that kind of long training and can enjoy it much more than me.
As I told you before, the game doesn’t transpose point-and-click adventures exactly to VR, but it is strongly inspired by them… it recreates a new genre that is more suitable for VR. Happy Giant has been very smart in this because porting a 2D game to VR with the same mechanics would have been a suicide move, like porting a radio program onto TV. They have innovated the genre and created something that adapts more to VR, which is a technology where the users want to have more agency, want to interact more with the environment and the objects, and not just pointing and clicking. And this game gives a lot of interactions with the surrounding environment.
But the game still reminds the old Sam & Max for some things. First of all, you talk a lot, like in the old adventures: not that much like in those titles, but you still talk a lot, especially with Sam & Max. And like in those old games, you can poke the characters multiple times, and they will always tell you new funny answers. Here comes another problem: reading dialogues on your screen while you are on your comfy chair is a thing, listening to dialogues when you are standing with a shoebox on your head is another one. I found dialogues a bit too slow and heavy to enjoy in VR: I loved them on PC, but in VR I want more action, more agency, not just reading/listening to an NPC. The long dialogues contribute a lot to the slow start of the game. But on the other side, the dialogues are super fun and full of puns and jokes, so they are a delight to listen to. As soon as you get used to the rhythm of the game, you enjoy them a lot… just relax and have fun with Sam and Max!
Another thing where this game reminded me of the old point-and-click adventures is when there were some enigmas to solve and I didn’t know how to solve them. For instance, you are in an environment (e.g. a supermarket) and you have to find the right object that combined with another object gives you the solution to the current problem. Sometimes this is easy, but there are 2-3 moments when this is a bit difficult, like in the plain old LucasArts titles. Again here we have the same problem depicted above: having to stop for hours with a headset on your head trying to find a solution would be very tiresome and frustrating, so Happy Giant did something smart and makes every time Sam or Max (usually Sam) give you a hint about what you have to do. For instance, if the solution to your conundrum were using ice cubes (I’m making this up, don’t worry), Sam could say “You should cool down the situation” so that you can imagine how to solve the problem more easily. I’ve been stuck anyway 2 times, but I think it’s ok… I mean, if a game with enigmas is too easy to solve, it is never rewarding! (Red Matter, one of my favorite Quest games, even gave me some trouble in this sense…)
I really would love to spoil you something else… but I won’t. Let me just tell you: play this game until the end. It starts slow, but it is a true delight to play later on… and it is full of surprises until the last second.
The total gameplay time for me has been more than 4 hours. I guess if you are very smart you can finish it even earlier, and if you want to explore everything and have high grades in all the training sessions, up to 7.
Here you are the first 30 minutes of gameplay if you want to see how the game starts!
Multimedia elements
Sam & Max: This Time It’s Virtual is a game about a very famous saga, so of course it has been made with great care about audiovisual elements. Everything has been made very well, and all the media that are in the game are well designed and developed.
The graphics have a cartoonish style, and this is perfectly normal given the fact that is a Sam & Max game, so a realistic style would have not had any sense. The problem with it is only due to the Quest. This game runs with great framerate even on Quest 1, and this means that Happy Giant had to do huge sacrifices on the graphical side.
Some environments may seem a bit empty or lacking details. You may sometimes notice the LODs of objects that appear in front of you when you move in a larger space. And so on. But honestly speaking, I don’t think that I would have been able to do a better job than them: Quest is a very complicated beast, and with HitMotion we of NTW have had huge issues with framerate too. Personally, I think that the developers did what they could for a Quest game. They tried to do their best to make things appear in the best way possible: for instance in the first scene of the game, when you are in a car with Sam & Max, you see the buildings appear in front of you, but they don’t appear immediately, but with some kind of fading.
I have appreciated a lot also the variation that there is in the presented environments and characters. During your adventure you visit many different places that have different styles, and this is very cool.
I wonder if the PC version that will come later one will feature some improvement on the graphical side…
Comfort
This game is flagged as having “moderate” comfort on the Store page and I agree with this classification. Sam & Max is most of the time a comfortable game, but there are some moments, like the ones where you fall down a high place or operate a piece of machinery that may give you motion sickness. At a certain point, I was even walking on a tall building and I felt a bit of vertigo when looking down (yes, it was scary!). There is one moment that I can’t spoil you that was super cool because I felt like a superhero, but I also had a lot of dizziness. I think this game will be ok for most of the players, but if you are truly sensitive to a virtual sickness, keep in mind that this game can give you some discomfort.
Accessibility
Sam & Max: This Time It’s Virtual also offers many options to customize the user experience: for instance, you can choose between smooth locomotion and teleporting. You can choose in which hands there is the watch with the stats. You can choose if seeing your hands with a male model, a female model… or even a skeleton model (if you identify yourself as a dead person, I guess). You can activate seated mode if you can’t play standing. There are subtitles that you can activate if you have hearing impairments. There are many options that try to make sure that the biggest number of people can try and enjoy this fun game. As a big advocate for accessibility, I compliment Happy Giant for this for sure.
These options have also helped me: since Sam & Max speak in jargon, if you are not a native English speaker like me, it’s better for you to activate subtitles because they will use a lot of terms that you don’t know. I think I missed a lot of the jokes because I had not the right linguistical background (I think I lost the meaning of at least 25% of them), but without subtitles, I wouldn’t have even understood what they were saying sometimes. Sam sometimes is a bit too British for my tastes, so being able to read what he was saying was a great help for me.
Presence and Immersion
I can’t say that the game is immersive for its realism: it is cartoonish, and the interactions with the people around you are scripted and bizarre, but for sure it delivers a strong sense of presence.
This happens since the first moment of the game: you open Sam & Max: This Time It’s Virtual and you find yourself in the backseat of the car, with Sam and Max in the front seats. The initial menu is like that and it is already very immersive because it makes you see yourself as if you were traveling with Sam and Max. And this is what will happen throughout the game.
Sam and Max are your companions all the time: they always speak with you, they help you, they give you tasks, they are a constant presence in your adventure. All this speaking with you makes you feel constantly there, committed to them and to the story. And this presence is also very physical: they are there, next to you, all the time. Sometimes well, Max, the crazy rabbit, is also… well, let’s say that you will interact with him even more closely. This is an adventure that you live together with them, you are the third member of the Freelance Police. And it’s incredible that especially Max makes also a lot of jokes about you. All of this creates a strong sense of presence because it makes you really feel part of a group, it makes you really feel part of an adventure.
And if you are a fan of the saga like me, you can feel a fantastic sensation: Sam, Max… there with you! So close to you, making jokes out of you! It’s fantastic and really unbelievable.
But Sam & Max are not the only components that makes the game so immersive: there are also the many interactions with the objects around you, the continuous action, the strong agency that you have on the world, that contributes to it. Also, the story is very interesting and surprising, and I constantly wanted to know more.
The first time I have played the game it was still in beta, and I wanted just to play 30-60 minutes to see how it was, because I was very busy those days. I couldn’t stop playing it, I liked it so much that in the end I finished it all. I couldn’t stop, really. As soon as the battery of the Quest had some charge, I wanted more Sam & Max. It was like a drug hahahah.
Price and Availability
Sam & Max: This Time It’s Virtual is being released on Oculus Quest on July, 8th for $29.99. Later this year it will reach SteamVR headsets via Steam and Viveport Infinity. A version for PSVR is set to arrive in early 2022.
Final impressions
Sam & Max: This Time It’s Virtual is not a perfect game, and probably it won’t earn a 10/10 on Road To VR like Half-Life: Alyx. It has a slow start, it is a bit frustrating sometimes, and its graphics can’t be amazing because of the limitations of the Quest.
But who cares. VR games must be fun, must be immersive, must be original. And Sam & Max offers all of this. It has a gameplay that I have not found in any other games, it sucked me in for hours, and gave me a ton of fun. It was also surprising and always unpredictable, and I never knew what was happening next. And I was there, so close to my idols Sam and Max! If you like me, have a lot of memories of old games, you can’t miss this one.
The game has also been developed with accessibility in mind, and it could be used also by people that are completely new to VR.
Personally, I think that it ticks many boxes of a great VR game. If I hadn’t got a review key, probably I would have bought it and have remained happy with my purchase. If you are a fan of the saga of Sam & Max, or if you want to try something new in VR, or even if you want to try something very old in VR, you can’t miss it. You should buy it because this a great piece of content. Period.
Of course, if you are not a fan of adventures, or you like games with more action and fewer dialogues, this is not the game for you. But I’m sure that even in this case, Sam and especially Max would be able to give you a smile anyway 🙂
So, Lumpy, head to this link and buy or wishlist Sam & Max: This Time It’s Virtual!
(Header Image by Happy Giant)
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