"Season 1?", you say. I know. It's weird. While it's not the first game to employ an episodic release, I'm pretty sure it's the first that I've ever played in that vein, and I'm a little conflicted. Instead of releasing one game that took multiple years to develop, they release individual episodes in much quicker intervals, where each episode is a part of an overarching story. Granted, I didn't really get the full benefit of the episodic nature since I played it seven years after the fact...
I was busy. Shut up.
Each episode is about two hours long. Sam and Max have a new case each episode, all which tie in together to slowly reveal the parts of a massive hypnosis conspiracy.
I feel that it took a couple episodes for the developers to hit their stride. The first three episodes feel very samey. There is essentially three rooms in which the bulk of the adventuring takes place in, plus an additional "boss" area at the end. The puzzles in those early episodes are fairly straightforward, and it's fairly obvious what an object is for once you get it. The formula for those first episodes seemed to be:
1. Notice people are hypnotized in some fashion.
2. Bosco, the Inconvenience Store owner, has an item you don't have enough money for.
3. Your adventure reveals three things you need to do.
4. Do the three things, get money and consequently the item from Bosco, proceed to "boss fight".
5. Go through the Boss Fight dialogue tree a bajillion times to find the correct combo to win.
The fourth episode broke the mold a little bit and was by far the strongest and most enjoyable. The dialogue was better overall, more..."Sam & Maxish". There were more visually interesting locations and lots of back and forth between them. Items were both more obscure in their purpose and could be used in various ways, making the solutions not so obvious. It was the first episode I had to stop and think about a puzzle for a moment. Plus, you're chasing around a giant mechanized Abraham Lincoln, which is pretty great any way you slice it.
The remaining two episodes weren't quite AS good as the fourth one, but they were still solid in that the dialogue was humorous, and the puzzles required slightly more pondering. Visually, there were additions of vehicles on the street to add a bit of life, and in Episode 6, they made it look like dusk. Not huge changes, but I like that you're trying. I also appreciated that, in the last two episodes, they wrote new dialogue for each clickable item. Every episode, I clicked on every single item in that office. Thanks for eventually rewarding me with new funny words. It made it worth it, unlike my obsessive opening of 516 toilet stall doors in Fallout 3, every time expecting a ghoul to leap out and scare the bejesus out of me. Ghoul tease...
Anyway, I enjoyed my reunion with Sam and Max overall, and I'm hopeful for the remaining two seasons. I give Season 1 a rating of...six hyperkinetic rabbity things and vow it won't take me another seven years to get around to playing Season 2.
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