Available from

Telltale Games!

Platform

Genre

Adventure

Publisher

Telltale Games

Developer

Telltale Games

ESRB

E (Everyone)

Released

August 30, 2010

- Usual crazy and out-there storylines all once again tie together for a satisfying Sam & Max finale

- Playing as the monster-mashing Max was a nice idea, but it’s too easy to get lost in city with hard-to-manipulate controls while searching for locales

Review: Sam & Max 304: Beyond the Alley of the Dolls (PC)

Review: Enslaved (360)

Review: Heavy Rain (PS3)

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Sam & Max 305: The City that Dares Not Sleep

Score: 8.5 / 10

Max is definitely not feeling himself at the end of the fourth episode and immediately beginning the fifth and final episode – The City That Dares Not Sleep of Sam & Max’s third series, The Devil’s Playhouse. He has been transformed from being the cuddy-but-crazy little rabbit crimefighter to a hulking, Cloverfield-esque monstrosity stomping around Manhattan. It’s up to his best buddy and Freelance Police partner, Sam, to find a way to help him regain his smaller (and less-city-

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threatening) stature before one of two things happen: “monster” Max destroys the city, or acting president Superball destroys Max.

Puzzlingly, The Devil’s Playground series concludes with the Devil’s Toybox, the main instrument of all the devilish mayhem throughout the first four episodes, making only a cameo appearance, and only one of those

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possessed toys, the Tron robot, being implemented into The City That Dares Not Sleep gameplay. Max’s psychic powers aren’t even used, either, but that’s a bit understandable since Max is a crazy, colossal beast nearly the entire episode.

It almost might have made more sense to have the stories of episodes four and five reversed, with the finale battle against Charlie Ho-Tep and the destruction of the Devil’s Toybox being the ending of the third season instead of its climactic moment.

But although it concludes with more of a sentimental ending than the usual hilarious ribaldry of a Sam & Max adventure, once more gamers will be laughing all throughout this episode, with its bizarre storylines zigzagging all over The City That Dares Not Sleep.

Where else can gamers find a tale where Momma Bosco returns to human form from the spirit realm, Superball becomes the acting president, and Sam, a pregnant Sybil (carrying her hubby’s – the living Lincoln Memorial – baby) and a giant cockroach all playing roles in what’s a combination Innerspace/Meet Dave plot that has them inventively cook up a giant “corndog” and willingly get swallowed into a transformed monstrous Max in order to save not only the city but Max himself? The funniest moment is when Sybil’s water breaks to the sound effect of a winning slot machine. Her “water” splashing down turns out to be pennies.

Going against the norm, the majority of the puzzles are intuitively solved instead of being the usual assortment of “huh?” conundrums. There is even a monster-stomping mode where gamers take control of Max as a monster and take a skyscraper-tall stroll through Manhattan. Unfortunately, that’s not as fun as it sounds, because the controls aren’t very smooth and it’s easy to get lost while trying to find the locales necessary to solve the puzzle.

Despite not being as good a individual game as some of the previous four, nonetheless The City That Dares Not Sleep is still a very fun Sam & Max adventure that nicely wraps up all of the season’s hilarious and goofy storylines in typical Freelance Police style.

- Lee Cieniawa
lcieniawa@armchairempire.com

(December 11, 2010)