There is a ton of laugh-out-loud material compressed into the 1-2 hours this game lasts. That is, assuming you appreciate this kind of humor. The jokes keep veering between edgy and goofball, dark satire and slapstick. Sam and especially Max are clinically psychotic and are not above extreme violence, so if that offends you this is probably not the game for you. If you see the joke, however, you’re in for a knee-slapping good time.
What make the game really work are the one-liners, quirky characters and the unreal conversations. Bosco, the inconvenience store owner (not a typo,) has adopted a French identity for the episode to avoid mob hit men. Job-hopping neighbor Sybil has taken up a career as a professional trial witness. The Toy Mafia all wear gigantic bear masks, yet try oh so hard to conjure up the imposing image of 1930s gangsters. Naturally, this sets the stage for some great dialogue, and the game delivers on every count.
Every scene is littered with clickable objects, all of which prompts additional hilarious comments by the main characters. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much all there is to the game, which brings us to the other side of the coin…
The bad
This episode is extremely short and extremely easy. I could write a complete walkthrough of the game in a single paragraph, but who’d need a walkthrough for something this unchallenging? Even if you make it a point to click EVERY object and explore EVERY conversation in full, you will still complete this game in less than two hours.
Furthermore, the difficulty is stuck somewhere between “super easy” and “no brain required” so the puzzles are merely there as segues for the storyline to move along. The biggest problem is that while there are tons of objects to look at and joke about, there are very few objects that have anything to do with the actual gameplay. It doesn’t help that the entire game is essentially confined to a grand total of six rooms.
It’s like a machine with only a handful moving parts – it doesn’t take much effort to figure out that the one round peg goes into the one round hole, and the one square goes into the one square hole.
