Sam & Max Hit the Road — The Sun is Settin' like Molasses in the Sky

Written by Michael

And the sky is a hazy shade of winter

When we last visited the carnivorous crimestopper and his bouncy buddy, Sam had just rescued Max from the hold of a dunk tank, and found a souvenir from another roadside attraction that might get us closer to solving the case.

For those just tuning in, we’re on the hunt of a missing bigfoot from the carnival. So far, it looks like an admirer helped rescue Bruno from his 9-to-5, and as we comb the country looking for him, it seems that other bigfoots have also been liberated as well. This is annoying our semi-nemesis, a county/western singer named Conroy Bumpus who has failed to treat us with the respect a suit-wearing puppy dog deserves. It seems he wants to purchase/hire/obtain these bigfoots for his own purposes. I can only suspect a music video featuring lots of large, obnoxious creatures, but I’m probably wrong about that.That souvenir we found was an empty snowglobe from the Mystery Vortex in Gullwump, Washington. (Quick geography lesson for the non-US folks: Washington, the state, is different from Washington D.C., often referred to as Washington, where obnoxious politicians go to spend our tax dollars. Washington, the state, is perhaps best known for Starbucks, which is ironically not Seattle’s Best Coffee.)

For anyone noticing, I refuse to use the game’s gross misspelling of “sno globe”, and will be shocked if there is a puzzle implication as a result.

The Jitterbug is a real dance. It can be taught by dumping Max’s ant farm down your pants.

Max thinks they’re being controlled by a bunch of really big magnets under the Earth’s crust, which is probably also making the metal plate in his head go ping. Sam thinks Max is an ignorant dolt, but I’m not so sure.

Inside the cave entrance, we find a scene that would be best suited to a carnival funhouse. Doors of various sizes, and as we walk through the room, we also change sizes. Pretty much opposite to whatever doors we walk near, of course. Isn’t that always the way?

I quickly look for something on an end table labeled “EAT ME” or a caterpillar smoking a hookah, but we haven’t gotten to the 1970s portion of this blog post yet. (SPOILER: we will soon meet a groovy friend.) There’s a player piano, but it isn’t useful to us now. (I play it, and Max admonishes me: “Don’t play it again, Sam.”)

Through the looking glass, and what Sam found there

Thinking about what Max said outside about magnets, I try using the fish magnet on the doors and other objects, but it has no effect. Looking at the mirror, Sam sees himself in 3D, and the mirror reacts to him. But I continue across the room, failing to open every door. So, I continue to the next room.

Bumpus, we’re about to throw down!

Here’s the museum gift shop, a mini-vortex, and a strangely-familiar block of half-melted ice, with a sign above it that reads “Big Foot”. Oh, and um, something else.

We’re upside down.

Somehow, Sam’s tie isn’t falling into his face, but I suppose that, just this once, we can suspend disbelief in this otherwise completely plausible game about anthropomorphic housepets searching for Sasquash. Oh, and look, a poster about the missing attraction, who is named Bert. The quest started by looking for Bruno. We never learned the name of the golf course’s bigfoot, but I suspect the letter B will be involved.

Oh, and look, a clue! Another pile of bigfoot fur. I do hope Sam isn’t allergic. I’m allergic to certain breeds of dog, and I’m afraid I probably would have needed to give up on the case long ago for health reasons.

So, on to the museum clerk.

“?Stoofgib tuoba wonk ouy od tahw?”

“I’m upside-down, cutie, not dyslexic”

Turns out that she left for a while yesterday to get her spine recompressed, and when she came back, her bigfoot was gone. And, of course, Conroy Bumpus was around, also trying to get his hand on him as well, but “then he got sick and had to leave.”

We showed her our snowglobe, asking if they sell any more of them. After all, one of them with a stopper in the bottom, still being all snowy would be nice, but they don’t anymore. They were wreaking havoc on the vortex, each one they built made the vortex weaker and weaker. So, to save their financial hides, they stopped making them. So, they also don’t have any stoppers.

Darn.

It’s a twister, Auntie Em!

But, we can go into the vortex, and it basically looks like a blue tornado has engulfed the two of us. But there’s a telling hint: just after the animation starts, my mouse cursor icon becomes visible while I’m inside. So, I wonder what happens if I try to refill my snowglobe?

The globe sucks up some of the vortex, but checking it out in my inventory afterwards, it appears that yes, we will be needing a stopper of some sort.

So, at this point, I was stuck. I couldn’t see how to progress any further at this place, and I was pretty sure that I had exhausted all the other places so far. So, after taking a day off, I came back and started revisiting locations to see what I had missed.

First, I went back to our office. We haven’t been there in a while, and I really should check the messages on the machine.

This is why the modern generation never checks their voicemail

Looking around, I found nothing new to interact with, or to take. Nothing changed outside either. (The golf ball picker has no effect on the ant farm, and I’m still not sure why I tried that.)

Nothing new at Snuckey’s, but something old, I suppose. Max still pesters me to use the bathroom whenever we visit, and I notice that as he leaves to go out back, I get control of the mouse back right away. Perhaps it’s because of the Vortex, but that got me thinking.

While he’s in the facilities, I go outside, thinking I could maybe follow him, but as soon as I step out of the door, the toilet flushes and he emerges. But, seeing me, he pauses before going back inside, which gives me an opportunity to click the TALK icon on him. We B.S. for a while, and then get to the topic of the restroom key attached to a giant file (for which they use the more formal but less-common term “rasp”).

“I think we should keep the rasp.”

“You’re probably right. No one deserves to use restrooms that clean.”

I mean, after all, they are the cleanest in 9 counties.

I don’t think a rasp will help me capture a vortex, but perhaps will be useful if I find an enslaved bigfoot or need to help my friend Otto escape from prison. So, I keep revisiting locations.

At the carnival, next to the Wak-a-Rat, is a giant magnifying lens. What I didn’t notice earlier is that I could take it. Not nailed down? Got it. (Sadly, I don’t still have the key to Trixie’s trailer. That would help with nails.)

I keep making my rounds with no luck, so I go back to the Vortex to see what I missed there. And, it’s something I should have tried first off.

Remember that mirror I looked at? I should have USEd it. That caused me to walk through it, underground...

Here’s an educational video about how magnets work.

...where it seems that Max was right. Magnets.

If you mess with the switches, the colored magnets change the lighting down here. And it turns out that it affects the way things work upstairs.

First, I change the switches until it releases Nur-Ab-Sal... er, I mean, the lighting turns blue. When I go upstairs, it appears that I can now approach the blue door at an appropriate height. However, off-camera, it’s apparently just a room filled with cheese. Changing the lighting down below to red lets me access the two red doors.

The first one I tried was filled with a forest of shoe trees. Personally, I can’t imagine the odor.

The second was more fruitful.

Bob Pinciotti getting a workout

Finally, the elusive Shuv-Oohl. I wonder if I’ll find out why we didn’t get a hint about him at the ball of twine.

But first, let’s pause for Max to drink from Shuv’s water bottle.

“...well, THIS bottled water is a real letdown.”

“We need your help.”

“Help is my middle name. Or maybe it’s ‘Starchild.’”

Every interaction with him screams “burnt out hippie”.

“1,2,3...”

“What are we fightin’ for?”

“Just checking.”

But asking him about Bruno, that’s the ticket. They go way, way back. He’s always felt a special kinship with the bigfoots, much the same way that Max feels with pointy sticks. And then...

...a Star Wars reference in a LucasArts game. That’s something new.

But also, it’s our way forward. But for a new location to be opened up to me, why didn’t it show on the map? He told me where to find it, between two other places I also can’t see on the map. A hunting mission. I think this is where that pair of binoculars is going to be useful, if I can fix them.

But he first gave us a fetch quest: he lost his mood ring in the twine ball. And from the way it’s said, I’m guessing it would have been possible for me to get to this point without previously having the location unlocked, which in a way impresses me about how many different ways you could explore this game and open up other locations. While this game is far from perfectly designed, it certainly isn’t strictly linear.

So... back to the (now 91 yards shorter) ball of twine.

I go to the museum again, where I have a close-up view of the ball within reach. It’s inside the ball? What do I have to go in with?

I use the broken golf-ball retriever on the ball, but Sam shuts me down. “That might be a good idea, but the golf ball retriever’s still broken.” How can I fix it? I look through my inventory, and a stupid idea comes to mind.

If you’re happy and you know it, clench your hand.

I try attaching the still-twitching hand of Jesse James to the retriever, and it almost reaches the ring, but not quite. So, what else could I do?

Hmm, I wonder. Is a mood ring magnetic? Probably. Let's add the magnet. And... success!

Looking at the ring in my inventory, it simply says, “I must be happy.” And I suppose I am, for solving this puzzle.

So we go back to Shuv-Oohl, and he’s Grateful. But thankfully, not Dead. So, I keep on Truckin’. He pushes us some more about finding Frog Rock, and tells us that when we do finally find it, we’ll need to smear the fur from 3 different bigfoots over the rock and then use some mystic mole man powder.

“What’ll happen then?”

“Something wonderful.”

So it seems that the next job is to find Frog Rock. So, off to the binoculars!

It’s electric. Boogie-woogie-oogie.

Again, I’ll cut short the explanation of me overcoming past lapses in brainpower. Those exposed wires? I was again reminded of how similar things were handled in my last game for the blog. If I try to pick them up, they become an inventory item in my hands. I can hotwire the binoculars, and now, apparently, the binoculars control the revolution of the restaurant.

Max calls that the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard, but Sam still has some electric coursing through him from the unlicensed electrical work, so he shocks Max. It was, ahem, a hare-raising experience.

I’ll be here all night, folks. Make sure to try the veal.

So I use the binoculars, and after a little visual exploration, Sam gives up. “I could be looking right at Frog Rock, but everything’s too tiny.”

Well, another item manipulation puzzle. Let’s add the magnifying lens to the binoculars. I do that, and Sam basically hints that I’m on the right track. He tells me to make sure to stop the rotation when I find it.

The controls for the binoculars are mentioned in the manual, but basically, it involves clicking left or right around the dial at the bottom of the screen. I eventually get the hang of it, and spin past one of the sights that Uncle Mole Man told me about, Mount Badrich. And then...

“Hmm, it's a rock.... and it’s between the two things Shuv-Oohl said it was between... it must be Frog Rock!”

Down in Froggy Rock! [Baritone: Down in Froggy Rock.]

So the new location appears on my map. But I keep looking around in the binoculars, to see if there’s any other tourist traps to visit. Let’s see: the Inexplicable Valley of Lights, the Enchanted Argyle Forest, the Eternal Plane of Acid Rain, the Largest Stump in the World... well, none show on the map, but I’d like to visit one of them sometime. Maybe after I finish this game.

But for now... ROAD TRIP!

But at least there’s a sign there to tell me I’m in the right place.

There’s a rock, and nothing else. So let’s follow the Voodoo Lady’s instructions, and put all the ingredients into the bag. Something of the dead, something of the thread...

Wrong game. All we need here is something of the head. Say, the hair of three bigfoots. We smear those on the rock, and then add the mole man powder, and suddenly, the world changes for us.

And this brings us to our next destination, and a perfect place to stop this session. I’m kind of hungry anyway. Max! Make me a sandwich!

"Love Me Tender" leaves 'em cryin' in the aisle

Session Time: 1 hour 15 minutes
Total Time: 4 hour 45 minutes

Inventory: Lots of money, World of Fish magnet, bucket of golf balls, black light flashlight, carnival pass, Sam & Max™ Car Bomb, Sam & Max Coloring Book, Sam & Max Dress-Up game, stilt walker’s outfit, Gator Golf score card, Jesse James’ severed hand attached to a golf ball retriever, bent left-handed metric wrench, snowglobe, 91 yards of twine, supersized Snuckey’s cup, rasp with key attached

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There’s a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no points will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. Please...try not to spoil any part of the game for me...unless I really obviously need the help...or I specifically request assistance. In this instance, I've not made any requests for assistance. Thanks!