Every Lucasarts Adventure Game: Ranked Worst To Best
7. Sam & Max Hit The Road
If you're dissuaded by old school point 'n' click games' propensity for puzzles only solvable by following the obtuse logic of either the developer or setting, you should probably swerve away from Sam & Max Hit The Road harder than the eponymous dog does in his police DeSoto.
However, if you don't mind that - and most adventure gamers don't - and are looking for a scathing pastiche of kitsch Americana, replete with quotable non-sequiturs galore and, um, a few rather crap minigames, then look no further. Hit the Road is almost the perfect marriage of subject and genre, the above-lamented vagaries of adventure game design being an apt vehicle for the eccentric world of Steve Purcell's original comic strip. Using the magnetised severed hand of Jesse James on the World's Largest Ball of Twine to fisk a mood ring might sound like Adventure Game Hell 101, but the conceit - even if it's hard to fathom it - just works in this tourist trap iteration of the USA.
On a technical side, Hit the Road does a few new things as well. SCUMM is refined into a more direct, latter-day Sierra style series of icons, and this was also the first Lucasarts adventure with full voice acting. And get this: it's not dreadful!
Most won't have the patience for Sam & Max's journey, but those who stay on the road to the end invariably look back on the trip fondly.