Room" flash games and Touch Detective, this game contains the hot spots adventure game veterans are used to. The puzzles should be discovering what to do with your items, not struggling to find out which parts of the background you can interact with.
Move Sam around on the screen by clicking places for him to go. You have no control over the camera which is a little frustrating because sometimes you'd really like to take in all of the scenery, but you'll never find yourself struggling with the engine to obtain an item.
Click on an object that gives you a name and Sam will either provide you with a description, or Sam will pick it up and it'll be used for a puzzle later on. To use an item, simply click on the brown cardboard box found in the lower left of the screen, and click on the desired item icon that tumbled out onto the screen. Then use the new cursor to use the inventory object to interact with things in the world.
Dialogue is key to the adventure game world, and that is where Sam & Max: Culture Shock really shines. You'll need to coax important pieces of information out of characters, as well as insult them to maximum effect. In most adventure games the dialogue plays a more utilitarian role, but in Sam & Max, you'll find yourself going through dialogue trees multiple times just to get all of the jokes. Good times.
The only other form of gameplay is driving Sam & max's old DeSoto. This is probably the worst part of the game. Instead of using the arrow keys, you use the mouse and click to where you want Sam to steer to. This results in a lot of imprecise steering, and it honestly feels like this part was entirely tacked on. Thankfully, you'll only go through it twice in the game.
Graphics
Everything's pretty good. Most everything is faithfully recreated in Sam & Max-ese, which I was very pleased by. I can forgive a bit of the clumsiness of the character rendering, because in Sam & Man's twisted world, nobody ever looks right, not even in 2D. The world and the locations are done well enough, you just wish there was more of it. There are really only 7 "locations" in the game, and that's if you include the car, and the outside of the final area.
One of the more fun parts of Sam & Max Hit the Road was all the various places you'd travel to, and it's sad to see that not implemented in this version.
However, I can't really complain too much about this aspect of the game. It's all done pretty well for a game of this price.
Audio
Now here's something I can complain about. Sam just does not sound right. Since he's the source of about 50% of the dialogue in the entire game, you gotta make sure he's nailed that down. The voice actor plays him completely flat, and he's got no nuance to his voice. It's like he's struggling just to do Sam flat, so adding personality and emotion would break him out of that character. I think they need to find someone who's closer to what Sam should sound like naturally.
The Soda Poppers song was painfully unfunny, too. It was a bummer since the John Muir song from San & Max Hit the Road was so well done, I expected the Soda Poppers song to at least have some humor to it. It wasn't funny, and it certainly wasn't sung well, so hearing it multiple times in the game was unwelcome.
That being said, the voice actor who plays Max, Andrew Chaikin, is pretty much dead on and Joey Camen also nails his part as Bosco.
Gripes
This game is short, WAY short. I understand it's supposed to be that way because it's so cheap, but I'm going to need a bit more than 3 hours of gameplay every 2 months. I was pretty disappointed when I found out that I was on the way to stopping the madman's evil plot 20 minutes into the game.
More disheartening than the brevity of the game was the ease of the puzzles. I don't really like being stuck, but honestly, I pieced together everything I needed to do with fairly little trouble. Most puzzles were solved on my first attempt, and that's not generally something I've come to expect. Maybe a little more thought into first crafting the story and puzzles, and then the locations next.
Overall
This is pretty much what you can expect for $8.95. (A little under $6 if you buy the "Season Pass", which I'll take credit for naming when I met with Telltale at E3.) However, it really isn't what I expected from Sam & Max. Whether that's because I held Sam & Max in such high esteem, or whether that's because this was a little off because it was a first effort, I can't tell right now.
It does seem, though, that the gamer who patiently waits for all the episodes to come out, and then plays them in one long block is going to have a much more satisfying time, in my opinion.
