Dealing in Nostalgia: Poker Night at the Inventory Returns to the Table
- Antal Bokor
- 19 hours ago
- 2 min read
Somewhere in my awareness, I knew the Telltale Sam & Max games had been remastered, but I didn’t expect Skunkape to bring Poker Night at the Inventory back into the hands of modern audiences.
Not that it’s really for modern audiences. It stands as a curious time capsule of characters who once dominated gaming and internet culture, but have since become icons of yesteryear. While their mainstream relevance might not be what it was in 2010, the crossover still works, and underneath the nostalgia is a surprisingly decent game of poker.
I’m certainly not complaining that this modern version of Poker Night is available. I’m all about game preservation, and since the original was delisted in 2019 when its IP rights expired, this doesn’t feel like a mindless cash grab.
That is especially true since developer Skunkape put a fair amount of work into taking the original game’s underlying code and elevating it from a novelty experience to a mechanically sound poker simulator. Skunkape completely rewrote the engine’s mechanics, so opponents now play a much more accurate game of Texas Hold’em, making decisions that actually align with their distinct personalities.
A good amount of work has also been put into the game’s visuals. Character models are now in high definition, animations have been sharpened up, and the Inventory itself has been spruced up with more environmental details, new Easter eggs, and a revamped lighting system to set the mood.
Skunkape has also thrown in a handful of welcome quality-of-life toggles. You can now adjust the AI difficulty, lower the stakes, and change the starting buy-in if you want a more relaxed experience. If you prefer a cleaner game, you can turn off the profanity, and you can even dial back the frequency of the banter once you've heard all the jokes. There are also new visual filters, like motion blur and film grain, to tweak the cinematic vibe.
One of the massive draws of the 2010 release was its tie-in with Team Fortress 2. As an homage to that, on the PC version, you can once again acquire "Reissued" versions of the characters' signature items for TF2. By busting out specific characters during collateral rounds, you can unlock the Iron Curtain (The Heavy), the Enthusiast's Timepiece (Tycho), the Lugermorph/License to Maim (Max), and the Dangeresque, Too? sunglasses (Strong Bad).
On Steam, these transfer directly into your TF2 inventory, carrying a "Reissued" tag in the title to preserve the rarity and trading economy of the 2010 originals. On other platforms, you unlock them as in-game trophies to show off, so there’s still an incentive to collect them.
While Poker Night at the Inventory isn’t the absolute best poker game out there, Skunkape’s remaster has undeniably made it a better one. I hope they continue this rerelease trend and get the rights to do Poker Night 2 next.
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