Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space

With nearly three years having elapsed between the PC and XBLA debuts of Sam & Max Save the World, it’s a welcome surprise to see the second season of the point-and-click adventure arrive just three months after the first. Entitled Sam & Max: Beyond Time & Space, the five-episode series picks up where its predecessor left off, and adheres closely to the formula that made it a notable success. Telltale’s follow-up features the same refined interface, an equally zany cast, and plot that lives up to the inspired lunacy of Sam & Max’s previous outing. This time, however, the difficulty has been upped to a quite literally devilish degree. The result is an extended play experience (20+ hours), but not necessarily extended enjoyment.

Adventure games tend to walk a fine line between puzzles that are fiendishly clever, and those that are simply fiendish. Beyond Time & Space occasionally falls afoul of this distinction, and features several cruel and unusual conundrums. These can halt your progress for lengthy stretches, which is not only frustrating, but also interrupts the narrative flow of each episode – a particularly unfortunate result, given that Telltale’s writing continues to be among the series’ highpoints.

In apparent recognition of the increased challenge, Telltale has introduced a new hint system that does go some way to curbing frustration. Max, your sidekick, will occasionally nudge you in the right direction by complaining that he’d rather be in another location, indicating that your sleuthing has gone astray. Whether or not Max offers a suggestion is seemingly determined by the amount of time you’ve spent aimlessly interacting with objects and characters that have nothing to do with a puzzle’s actual solution. While you can increase the frequency of Max’s hints via an option-menu slider, you can’t actually access them by interacting with Max directly. In all, the hint system is perhaps not as robust as is warranted, and will hopefully be re-worked for future Sam & Max outings.

Apart from some overly obscure puzzles, the only real knocks against Beyond Time & Space are hold-overs from the first series. Namely, the game still suffers from an unnecessarily patchy frame-rate and some navigation issues born of the transition to console.

Otherwise, it remains difficult not to recommend Beyond Time & Space to fans of the graphic adventure genre. The series features some of Telltale’s strongest writing, and the settings are, on the whole, a colourful departure from the repetitive scenery on show last time around. The new characters, too, add some welcome variety – none more so than Goth vampire Jurgen, complete with emo hair do and dual nipple piercings. Newcomers to adventure games should probably stick to Sam & Max Save the World, but Beyond Time & Space is still very much worth playing for those that discover they are fans of what Sam, Max and Telltale have to offer.