I picked up
Sam and Max Hit The Road in the holiday sale. Definitely worth a couple bucks. Great performances, Sam is funny as hell compared to the telltale stuff where he's a little more restrained. The art and music must have been next level on release, as it still looks great. Very brief little game, only about six hours, but definitely made use of the time. A little much on the cartoon logic (corkscrew puzzle :| ) but that's just a sign of the times it was made in. Maybe I'll pick up Monkey Island 2 after this.
I'm going back and giving second chances to extremely popular games that I'd otherwise written off, meaning that I put a few hours into
The Last Of Us yesterday. The performances were great and the dialogue is fine if overly expository, but good god what a bore to interact with. So much of this game is traversal - walking down hallways and moving dumpsters and boosting people up ledges, and none of it is anything other than strictly functional. At the same time, the atmosphere of the first couple clicker encounters was fun and tense, but the game is utterly unconvinced with curating that experience. Being an interactive work, these first impressions
should matter - the moment when I turned around and realized the clickers were following my light steps was a genuinely fun one, and a moment I recall better than the actual cutscene in which the clickers were introduced, but in the five seconds that follow my ally comes STOMP STOMP STOMP sprinting through the scene, bantering over a previously tense moment. Lord help me for invoking Kojima, but just comparing the first clicker encounter to the first BT encounters in Death Stranding, the BT's have a clear authority that is not undermined in the same sequence they're introduced. It takes many hours to get the upper hand on the BT's. Yet here Joel's instinct mastery of bricks and your loud yet undetectable friends reveal them for the haunted house animatronics they are. The only authority clickers have is within a noninteractive context, utterly apathetic to the emotions that I feel while in control.
I'm reminded of the first shooting sequence in the game, cynically set against the waist high boxes we all know and love. The game goes to great lengths to establish just how few humans there are, and with Joel's daughter still fresh in the players mind to immediately throw you into a situation so knowingly disposable communicates it's goals more than anything else. It's a contrived scenario for a contrived medium, presenting to the player upfront the divorced atmosphere of its mechanical interactions against an ostensibly human backdrop. It knows that the gameplay doesn't amount to anything more than the shooting gallery filler between story beats and doesn't even do the bare minimum to acknowledge the tension of the interactive sequences. Why would it? The story flows better if you pretend so many of these sequences don't exist. They're commercial breaks.
Verdict: I was going to see this through to the end but it actively feels like it takes up too much of my time for how much enjoyment I'm getting out of this. This seems like a game best experienced in 50% fast forward on youtube. I actually had better memories of this.