Sam & Max 202: Moai Better Blues

Moai Better Blues is the second episode of the Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space, and it is a high quality one! What feels like a side case, might actually have significant for the rest of the season? This time Sam & Max battles an ancient prophecy to stop a volcano eruption as they're taken to the Easter Island through a mysterious triangle, together with some other familiar faces of the series. There they also meet... well some other familiar faces! The episode is filled with witty commentary, fun reference and holds up well with its humor. The gameplay is continues to be the same, as with previous episodes. The driving minigame from the first episode of this season appears, as you can continue to collect decals from the COPS. Would have been cool with the other decals from the first episode transferred over, but I don't think they do. Excited to see what the upcoming episodes have in stock! I do recommend staying after the credits of the game for a little bonus cutscene...

A hilarious chapter to a hilarious game. It's just so much fun getting to play as younger Sam later in the game (Can we have a game where we just play as Kid Sam & Max?)

The Steam banner for Moai Better Blues, itself one of the most nonsensical names in the series, has the most generic font of all the series' title screens. Seriously, look at it! Anyway, this episode is decent, with its major highlight being a bevy of good writing that shows Sam & Max at its most humorously cruel. The setting is also fittingly outlandish, but that's a trait the whole season has, so the credit for that ought to be applied to all five games more than any individual one. Ingenious portal-based puzzles balance out the rote Monkey Island-style 'complete three tasks' section in the latter half of the game, but they can't entirely make up for the higher-than-usual puzzle difficulty combining with the relative lack of thematic cohesion on display. It's perhaps the weakest episode of Season Two, mainly by virtue of being okay rather than great like the others - in particular, the aforementioned outlandish setting of Easter Island isn't utilized quite as well as one would hope. As an aside, the original Portal came out a couple of months before this game, so it certainly looks like Telltale took some inspiration if you know what I mean.

The entire series relies on its unfunny jokes which hinder the gameplay a lot, and the gameplay itself is rather average anyway. I shouldn't have bothered myself and I don't recommend it.

Sam & Max 202: Moai Better Blues is another entry in a long series of short ScummVM style point and click adventure games. This episode has our comedy freelance police rabbit and dog travel to the tropics to deal with Easter Island heads and erupting volcanoes. Gameplay consists of basic point and click adventuring and inventory management, with the occasional minigame. The only things preventing this from being recommendable is the way Telltale Games removed it from the store, and replaced it with a fully remastered collection (which I do recommend). https://store.steampowered.com/app/1747050/Sam__Max_Beyond_Time_and_Space/

It's enjoyable but I'm disappointed. Pretty average episode, not that much fun stuff happens and puzzles are tedious. There've been plenty of occasions where creators could have gone wild with ideas but I guess they didn't have much inspiration for this one.

Surfing

I liked it