![]() ![]() ![]() In a way, this 1998 game has a more primitive interface than its 1980s forebears. The awkward interface doesn’t help either. Many players will be forced to consult a walk-through to complete some of the game’s head scratchers, and that always leaves a bad taste. Grim Fandango is tough from the outset and periodically gets insane. Forget the slow, methodical ratcheting up that teaches players the game mechanics. Solving these puzzles is, as Salvador Dalí once said of painting, either easy or impossible. It’s more that they’re hard in arbitrary ways, requiring players to get in sync with the designer’s twisted inner sense of logic. To say that these games are hard doesn’t quite cut it. Grim Fandango belongs to a tradition of adventure game design that can be traced back through Schafer’s equally loved Monkey Island games, Sierra’s seminal King’s Quest franchise, and even Infocom’s text adventures of the early 1980s (think Zork). Games aren’t all sound and visuals, though. Though the graphics have been tweaked a bit (Manny looks better, the backgrounds do not), the audio gets a much more thorough treatment, as the game’s terrific score was rerecorded by a live orchestra. This is Pixar-quality design in a 1998 adventure game package. Allowing for the technical limitations of its time, it looks good enough to be a movie. No game before or since has looked like Grim Fandango: It’s absolutely unique. The star of the show is the visual style, which mashes together all sorts of disparate elements - Día de los Muertos costumery, art deco, Aztec sculpture, film noir, movies like Casablanca and Vertigo - yet somehow keeps it coherent and unified. When Manny falls in love with a beautiful client, he’s drawn on an adventure that will take him from the offices of the Department of Death to the exotic port of Rubacava and beyond, encountering various lost souls and eccentric demons along the way. But the years have been kinder to its artistic components - story, art direction, writing, audio - than to its gameplay and interface.įor those who didn’t catch this classic the first time around, Grim Fandango puts you in the shoes of Manny Calavera, a down-on-his-luck Grim Reaper/travel agent tasked with ushering newly departed souls to their destiny in the afterlife. First, how does it hold up? And second, are its extra goodies enough to justify a purchase for players who’ve already clocked plenty of hours in the Department of Death?Īs it turns out, Grim Fandango is still a good - often great - video game. The new Grim Fandango Remastered ($15 for PC, Mac, PS4, PS3, and PS Vita) redresses that injustice. That’s no way to treat a classic: It’s like if it were impossible to find a playable video recording of Rear Window or if The Great Gatsby had gone out of print. But for a long time, it’s been difficult to play the game on modern systems. It’s viewed as a pinnacle of the adventure genre, and it’s one of the reasons we rated 1998 as the greatest year in video game history. The game’s status as a masterpiece has been cemented by time. One of the best games ever made about the afterlife has finally got one of its own.Īfter lying dormant for 17 years, Tim Schafer’s seminal 1998 adventure game Grim Fandango has returned to the land of the living - a place where its cast of skeletal rogues and ne’er-do-wells would hardly feel at home.
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