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The new Sam & Max is an ironic combination of old-school game-making and new-school technology. It looks like something a decade old and plays like something from the Reagan years, but it could only have survived in the brand-new age of the broadband internet.

Here’s to modern times, then, because Telltale Games’ second season of Freelance Police is as good as the first so far. It’s not exactly a radical departure from the formula – sticking to the style of the LucasArts original is half the point, after all – but everything that worked before works here again. Sam is funny and charming, Max is funny and sociopathic, insanity lands on their doorstep on a daily basis, and nimble thinking is the key to escaping it all.

There are a few changes here and there, but they’re not especially drastic, and they’re uniformly for the better. Altogether, this is a respectable challenge for hardcore adventurers (however many of them may be left nowadays) and a fine introduction for players who haven’t done too much pointing and clicking in their time.

All The Clams We Can Eat

Even if you missed Sam and Max’s comeback last year, it doesn’t take much to get up to speed with their new adventures. Sam (the talking dog) and Max (the toothy rabbit) are “Freelance Police,” which is to say they deal with whatever random mayhem drops by the office. Their adventures play out in the point-and-click style of classic graphical adventures – you wander around, talk to people, pick up stuff, use some stuff on other stuff, enjoy the occasional arcade-style digression, and eventually come across a solution to the problem at hand.

Like the first “season” of the game, this is a collection of short-ish downloadable episodes. Season two will consist of six in all, with three released so far. “Ice Station Santa” summons Sam and Max to save Christmas, “Moai Better Blues” takes them to distant Easter Island, and “Night of the Raving Dead” has a nifty flashback structure that explains how the boys somehow wound up in a mad German scientist’s giant iron maiden.

Each episode’s pacing is such that a genius lateral thinker could maybe finish one in a weekend’s spare time. A walkthrough-assisted trip would take about 100 “turns” – that being Infocom or Sierra-speak for individual actions. Mere mortals, though, will almost certainly spend nine dollars worth of time being amused by each episode before they find a solution. Getting there really is half the fun in these games. If you blaze through with single-minded focus towards the conclusion, you miss at least half of the gags.

Of course, the jokes don’t always work, and sometimes when they go bad they go pretty bad. There’s a sequence involving a “package” in “Ice Station Santa” (use your imagination – it won’t take much) that’s about as painful as bad gags get.

As a rule, though, the games throw out one-liners at such a prodigious rate that a good one usually follows a bad one pretty quickly. It’s a nice mix of non sequiturs, bursts of absurd rambling, and the occasional way-too-obscure cultural reference. (“It’s a powerful magnetic pole!” “Roman Polanski?”) Luckily, the latter aren’t the cornerstone of the game’s humor. Family Guy this is not – it’s funny for players with any level of cultural literacy.

This Don’t Look Like The Lincoln Tunnel

One aspect of the games’ design that these episodes seem to tone down is the emphasis on poking through dialogue trees. A few puzzles still depend on digging out the right response from a chat with a supporting character, but those triggers are usually located somewhere pretty “shallow.” In other words, they should come up the first or second time you talk to the characters in question. The nightmare scenario of hitting the wall and going back to talk to every single character in the game probably won’t pop up for many players.

The best puzzles are the ones that spring out of the personalities of the characters and the weirdness of the environments. Explore the world, get to know the people, pick up everything that isn’t nailed down, and you should do pretty well. A couple of Rube Goldberg-esque challenges bring to mind the infamous Babel fish puzzle (from The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), but none of them are quite that brain-twistingly sadistic.

While they still involve plenty of poking around Stinky’s, Sybil’s, and Bosco’s Inconvenience store; all three of these episodes give Sam and Max a chance to get away from the block and enjoy a change of scenery. The new areas aren’t necessarily enormous, but they’re respectably packed with visual details and jokes to go along with them. Meanwhile, the old locales have gotten a little refreshment – Stinky’s, for instance, has a brand-new proprietor - albeit one still named Stinky.

Who Cares? I’m Cute!

Besides the obvious practical, economic advantage; the episodic nature of the new Sam & Max adventures gives them a leg up in the gameplay department, too. In the early days of PC gaming, adventure games tended to be long and brutally difficult. After all, players had to get their theoretical money’s worth. Freelance Police, though, features shorter adventures, so you get to the payoff quicker, and the abundance of inexpensive different episodes means if you get bored or stuck with one, you can easily try out another. Meanwhile, if you’re new to this point-and-click thing entirely, nine bucks isn’t much to spend on testing the waters. Everybody enjoys a good laugh, after all, and Sam & Max sure serves up plenty of those.

Review: D.F. Smith