What Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space is
This is a remastered version of Telltale's second episodic Sam & Max season, updated by a small team of the original developers. You play as Sam, a six-foot canine detective with a nose for justice, and Max, a hyperkinetic rabbity-thing with a taste for mayhem. Together they're the Freelance Police, an irreverent comedy duo that has been around in comics and games for more than thirty years. The game is a point-and-click adventure told across five interconnected cases, and it's a singleplayer experience: you explore locations, talk to eccentric characters, and pick apart puzzles, with a joke hiding behind nearly every hotspot. The cases take you from the North Pole to the Fountain of Youth, from outer space to Hell and back, with stops that include a showdown with Santa Claus, a race to subdue a giant volcano, and a face-off with a Eurotrash vampire. Along the way you'll deal with paranoid shopkeeper Bosco and his talk of a grand conspiracy, diner proprietress Stinky and the truth about her grandfather (also named Stinky), and flaky neighbor Sybil Pandemik's search for true love.
How a group plays it together
Steam lists Remote Play Together for this game, so one person who owns it can bring friends along through that feature while the main game itself is played as a singleplayer adventure. Since the game is dialogue heavy and built around a comedy duo, watching along works well: friends can weigh in on which dialogue option to pick, argue over what an object does, and spot the joke you walked past. The episodic structure gives a natural stopping point — finish a case, hand the controls over or take a break, then start the next one. Optional driving mini-games in the 1960 DeSoto convertible offer a lighter detour from the story, and the hood decals and car upgrades you win carry over across episodes, so there's something to show for a shared run.
Before you start
The game detects when you're stuck and offers subtle contextual hints, and you can customize how often hints appear to suit how you like to play. If you're playing with friends, decide up front whether you want hints on or off, since that changes how much the group solves on its own. Localization covers English voice with subtitles in English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish, so check the subtitle language before you begin if someone in the group needs it. The remaster updates lighting, lip-sync, cinematography, audio, and music, and adds eight all-new musical tracks performed by live jazz musicians. Controller support is listed among the tags, which matters if you're passing the keyboard and mouse around or playing from the couch.