Ah, Sam & Max, delinquents from yesteryear that I had cherished the memory of for so long, and now have had the chance to play through their weird adventures once more. The wise-cracking duo who don’t mind cracking a few skulls are back in this last of their original trilogy of titles, which at the time were released episodically, but are now all packed into one remastered edition. If you’re familiar with them already, I’m not even sure why you’re still reading, but for the uninitiated we’ll do some review.

These two are quite the pair of private dicks, with Sam who more typically plays the straight man to Max’s more deviant attitude and antics. Truly, the fun in this series has always been at the forefront, with their dialogue and reactions to all sorts of situations driving the laughs. Sure, there are also puzzles to be solved, but more often than not the humor also tends to be intertwined in the eventual solutions these two come up with.

In the case of The Devil’s Playhouse, they decided to add a new and unusual element to the series, and that’s the fact that Max appears to have acquired a growing variety of psychic powers, which you’ll need in order to work through the game’s 5 chapters. Whether it’s seeing into the future, changing his form, teleporting, or other tricks, there’s no question that these abilities opened the door to even more unusual situations and solutions than before… and all generally played for laughs.

Given that these were originally released individually, there’s a pretty great pace to playing through them a few hours at a time, making for easy and natural breaks between chapters if you’d like. As always, not every joke will hit for everyone, and not every puzzle will make much sense, but on the whole you have to give the developers credit for simply swinging for the fences throughout, especially given the odd creativity sometimes made possible with Max’s newfound powers. It may be sad to see the original trilogy come to a close in the last chapter, but this feels like a fitting finale to one of the better classic adventure series ever to be made.