![]() Tim Schafer and his team decided to take advantage of increasing PC horsepower, putting 3D characters against pre-rendered 2D environments. In 1998, adventure games were typically 2D affairs, with point-and-click interfaces. You can’t look at a game like Grim Fandango without considering the context in which it was released. The payoffs to failure were rarely interesting or fun (unlike King’s Quest death scenes). As someone who often resorts to a trial-and-error approach when all else fails, that additional wrinkle in the puzzle design forced me to backtrack. To further complicate things, several puzzles are based around objects that can be broken, consumed, or otherwise used up. If you thought you were clever when you put batteries in a broken radio in Telltale’s The Walking Dead, you don’t know the meaning of puzzles. You need to pay close attention to every snippet of conversation and background object, while constantly cross-checking possible relationships between them. Hand-holding wasn’t popular in this era, and designers seemed to relish adding at least a couple of completely nonsensical puzzles. Grim Fandango is challenging, especially if you aren’t familiar with the bizarre logic that governs adventure games. Glottis’ gluttonous behavior also inspires several of the best puzzles. Glottis is a great comic foil who’s always getting into trouble, and their relationship seems more believable than the love story that Manny has with the client, a departed soul named Mercedes. Manny’s interaction with a car-obsessed demon named Glottis is one of the high points. ![]() The world-building and characterization are excellent, even if they don’t necessarily fit together in a satisfying story. That sets a chain reaction into motion, which leads Manny into uncovering a conspiracy, falling in love, and chasing his paramour across the Land of the Dead. A rival is doing a suspiciously good job of upselling customers, so Manny decides to steal one of the creep’s clients. His job is to reap souls and then sell them travel packages to get them to the next stage of the afterlife in comfort. When the adventure begins, Manny is a low-level employee at a travel agency for the newly departed. Even 17 years after release, this bizarre vision of the Land of the Dead is captivating, mashing together film noir, Aztec religion, and slapstick comedy. Some things just refuse to die, however, and the release of a new remastered version of Grim Fandango gives a new generation of players the chance to see what all of the fuss was about. ![]() Unfortunately, travel agent Manny Calavera’s reaper-like appearance was appropriate in more ways than one the game was a sales flop, and it marked the end of days for LucasArts’ involvement in the genre. Grim Fandango is widely heralded as one of the greatest adventure games of all time.
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