We already knew a remaster of Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse was on its way from Skunkape Games, but now we have a release window. It will arrive Spring 2024.
Technically, this is a delay, but the announcement of a 2023 timeframe never happened. It was just a shared hallucination.
Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse was the last of Telltale’s revival of the Sam & Max license and also sort of the last traditional point-and-click adventure that they want you to remember before the formula changed with The Walking Dead. Jurassic Park: The Game never happened. It was just a folie à deux.
Skunkape has been going to work saving the three seasons of Sam & Max from being buried alongside Telltale. While those games were still technically available, they were from an uncomfortable period of PC gaming and didn’t support the beefy resolutions we have today. Skunkape has taken a brush to the first two seasons and touched them up beautifully with better lighting and lip-syncing. Now it’s Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse’s turn.
Indulge me
I played Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse back in 2010 when they were being released one episode at a time. I got about halfway through episode three when I lost interest and never went back. I’d say that’s part of why the episodic format is so rare these days, but I’m pretty sure Telltale asked for players to pay upfront for all the episodes at that point, so they didn’t lose sales to poor attention spans.
What I did play sticks with me to this day because the humor felt a lot darker than the first two seasons. While I don’t think series creator Steve Purcell contributed to the last season, they did bring in Mike Stemmle, who helped design 1993’s Sam & Max Hit the Road.
After Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse, I’m hoping that Skunkape remasters another Telltale title, Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People. Telltale recently lost the rights to it, which I hope means that they were picked up by Skunkape. The Brothers Chapman themselves are making games in the Homestar Runner universe, with Dangeresque: The Roomisode Triungulate having released this past August (it’s fantastic). The time is right. Or maybe I should say, “Gimme.”
The remaster of Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse is set to release Spring 2024 for PC, Switch, PS4, and Xbox Series X|S.
