Hope you’re ready for cosmical and magical adventure, because Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse Remastered is coming in 2023, and Skunkape Games has released a new trailer teasing the return of what is definitely the most wild-ride-bonkers entry in the series. Started back in 1993, Sam and Max are pretty venerable characters in PC Gaming, and it’s good to see them looking so good again.
This is after all the entry that includes an alien invasion, straight-up cosmic horror gods, magical artifact toys for Max, and a kind of apocalypse type… thing. Oh right and there are clones, like, a lot of them. Look, it gets wild, even by Sam and Max standards, and if wacky adventures are you’re thing I think you’d be well-served to get those other two remasters played by whenever it is in 2023 this gets released.
This most superlative series about suit-wearing dog Sam and “hyperkinetic rabbity thing” Max was made back in the late oughts and early 2010s by Telltale based on the earlier 1990s LucasArts adventure game and cartoon series. This series of remasters has been going since 2020, with Sam and Max Save the World Remastered (opens in new tab).
These remasters are done by Skunkape Games, a developer composed of members from the original development team back at Telltale. Speaking of which, this is the one that includes the studio’s namesake, the alien space gorilla General Skun-ka’pe.
We’ve long considered the series a peak of detective-driven-comedy-PC-gaming, whatever that really means, and the original sits on our list of the best detective games on PC (opens in new tab). Though it has the weird leaps of logic that characterize LucasArts games of that era, we said that “it’s genuinely funny throughout.”
If you’re not familiar with the series already, it’s a classic of goofy comedy. Earlier this year, we dug up a feature from 2006 about the making of Sam and Max Hit the Road (opens in new tab),