By the time you're reading this, Situation Comedy, the next installment in Telltale Games episodic Sam & Max series should be available for purchase. Of course, what this also means is that I never managed to put my thoughts down on what I thought of the first episode prior to it's release. I'm going to try and get a full review of both episodes up this weekend.
For those of you who haven't picked up Culture Shock yet and are wondering if the series is worth grabbing, I'll sum up some of my feelings on it like this - I feel that while the writing (and surprisingly the voice acting) of the first episode was dead on, the episodic nature of the game seems to be hurting the gameplay elements of the title. Simply put, because each episode is a small, compartmentalized part of the story, all the puzzles tend to be fairly straight forward and really only involve a few items that are always near at hand. In addition, the number of locations available to the player in Culture Shock was a bit of a letdown as well - it felt more like you were trying to solve a web based puzzle game than playing a full scale graphic adventure game.
I'm hoping that Situation Comedy can reverse that issue and begin moving the game towards puzzles that could begin in one episode but not be solvable until another - or at the very least, will require some long term effort to solve within an individual episode.
For more information on Telltale's Sam & Max series as well as the links required for purchase of the game, check out Telltale's official Sam & Max website at this link.
