Grim Fandango Remastered

Ok, this one is actually really difficult to rate. Because from what I saw, I really liked the visuals, the writing, the ideas this game had.

But I pretty much hated the actual game part. It's one of those "try everything with everything" point-and-clicks where no solution really makes sense or rarely can be figured out without sheer grinding, and doing the grinding involves walking around the same areas back and forth, back and forth (the thrill they must have had back in the day, to have 3D characters move in 3D environment...the thrill that is non-existent nowadays).

I played a bit, but soon enough doing anything required looking at the walkthrough what to do because the puzzles really don't make sense, and that robs all possible pleasure from, you know, actually playing a game: it's a badly executed movie where you have a loose script and a bunch of footage that hasn't been edited.

The script might be great, the imagery in the footage pretty, but I just couldn't care.

When people die, they go to The Land of the Dead, then begin their passage to the Temple of the Ninth Overworld. Their options of travel very much depends on how good of a life they've led, and how much financial capability they have. Living a sinful life means they have to work in the Land of the Dead for their debt to be repaid. Doing okay means they have to take the long four year walk, whereas a good person will be able to book a place on the Number Nine Train, which is the ultimate form of travel.

You play as Manuel "Manny" Calavera who works as a Grim Reaper for the Department of Death in order to pay his debts. His role means he collects the dead, then sells them transportation much like a Travel Agent. Manny used to be a good salesman, but has had a long period of poor clientèle. A rival salesman called Domino seems to get all the good clients. Realising that he soon may lose his job, Manny sets out to steal one of Domino's clients. However, although it seems like Mercedes "Meche" Colomar deserves to book a spot on the train, Manny's computer suggests she has to take the long walk.

There's obviously something sinister going on, and Manny's interference ends up meaning he has to run, and take the four-year journey himself in order to find Meche who he has become obsessed with.

Each year unfolds in a distinct location. It begins in the town of El Marrow where the Department of Death's office is located. You meet the oversized daemon mechanic known as Glottis who becomes Manny's side-kick and joins him on his quest.

I felt the characters were okay; Manny is quite likeable but isn't as great as the characters in other point-and-click adventures (Sam & Max, Broken Sword, Monkey Island etc.). The supporting characters were pretty forgettable, and I often was confused when they re-appeared later in the story.

Although there's the option of mouse and keyboard controls, the game was originally designed to move Manny directly, so the default controls are to use a controller. Instead of 'pixel hunting' with a mouse, you can approach objects and press the button to inspect them (which is the controller's equivalent), but you can also take visual cues when Manny turns his head to look at important objects. This works fairly well, but I never quite trusted it because there can be a few objects in close proximity and it's quite hard to know if you are facing the correct object. When I played with an Xbox 360 controller, the button prompts were shown as Playstation buttons, which was bizarre.

The biggest problem in the game is the navigation. Areas are overly large and there's not much to interact with; which means you do a lot of running. Running around isn't very fun, but it's made harder by the fixed camera angles that are constantly changing - which is very disorienting. This means once the angle changes, you need to let go of the analogue stick; otherwise you could end up running back to where you came from or running at an awkward angle. There's plenty of areas where you will expect to be able to go but are prevented because you hit hidden walls, or hit objects you aren't touching. Conversely, you may not find areas where you can go because it looks like you have reached a dead end. Everything about it is extremely clunky. In some other point-and-click adventures, when you leave an area, a map appears which gives you the option of instant travel to the next location. This game really needs this feature!

There's a mix of fairly obvious puzzles and some fairly obscure ones. I often felt there could have been more clues to guide you. Even if it was like this in the original game, with this remaster; they could have fixed this. The only things they seem to have done in this version is replace the music, change the lighting model, and improve the character models, but the backgrounds are left in their original art.

With a touch of a button, you can toggle between the original version and the remastered version. When I tried this - it crashed, so I didn't bother trying again. It's worth noting that when the game begins, a message appears telling you to save on a regular basis because there is no autosave. In my opinion, this shows a lack of confidence in the stability of the product, and shows laziness of the developers to not add an autosave feature. From what I've read, the game suffered from many crashes when this remastered version came out, although the majority of problems have been fixed. There was a couple of instances where the game stuttered as if it was going to crash, and there was one instance where a character got stuck in a loop and I had to force-quit.

In conclusion, I would say I was very disappointed with Grim Fandango. Seeing all the perfect scores from other gamers and reviewers created a huge hype that I expected to match adventure classics like the early Monkey Island and Broken Sword games. What I played instead was a clunky mess. It may have laid down an interesting story within the opening moments, but I felt it didn't really go anywhere with it.

Grim Fandango is seen as something of a swan song for the era of point-and-click adventure games from the late 80s through the late 90s. Director Tim Schafer was coming off of two straight commercial successes and cult favorites in Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle, and was appropriately given a three-year development cycle to work with - an uncommonly large amount of time given how quickly their studio was able to churn out adventure games in that period. Although it ended up as a commercial failure and inadvertently ended the point-and-click era at LucasArts, Grim Fandango still has a lot to say, even if it hasn't aged as well as others in the catalogue.

To get this out of the way, the game has the same unfortunate fate that many late 90s games fell prey to - pre-rendered backgrounds of a very low resolution that are hard to ignore or smooth over as time passes. To properly remaster games like these, you must either have high-definition renders of the backgrounds in question (impossible), or to rebuild them all from scratch, which could take years. Like many others (Square Enix especially), Double Fine chose to leave the backgrounds alone in their remaster for Grim Fandango. It may not seem like such a large deal, but the foreground models themselves are high-res, making it a little hard to look at. Nevertheless, that clash of resolutions is somewhat resolved by a strong art direction and interesting locations throughout.

I don't think a story recap makes much sense, as the entire game is played for the narrative to unfold, but the main story beats hit at a pace consistent with a crime noir film, while optional conversations and poking around offer a really deep sense of world building. The game takes place in one year intervals, but you gain control of our protagonist, Manny Calavera, at the end of these intervals, so part of the fun is just figuring out what he's been up to the previous year of in-game time by interacting with locals and getting a glimpse of their interpersonal history. Manny is a genuine guy, if a bit sleazy and boneheaded (hah), but he's also quick on his feet and has no aversion to making a fool of himself just to make a bit of progress towards his goals - sort of like Threepwood before him.

The actual gameplay is pretty pure point-and-click, picking up items and using them in the correct places to make progress through an area, but the entire experience is encumbered by a clunky inventory system that requires you to stop the action, thumb through your items one at a time, and then watch an animation for each one until you find the one you need. Sounds a bit nitpicky but the sheer amount of interactions you'll have with your coat pocket will cause you notice it quickly and eventually come to lament its implementation. I thought it was built like that because there isn't a need for any interaction between items, but in the final act there is a single time this is needed to happen and I actually talked myself out that possibility as a solution (even though it was necessary) just because it had never happened before in the previous 7 hours. Lo and behold, I had to use on item with a table, and then again with the other. Completely unprecedented and confusing.

That said, the entire Year 2 in Rubacava is legitimately fantastic adventure gaming, from a design and structural standpoint. It feels like the best possible case for a sleazy, smoky, comedic noir game such as this, and I still will remember it fondly. The other years not reaching the same height is unfortunate, but not enough to rescind a recommendation - and that's coming from someone who's usually not that interested in plots in games at all. I really think this one is worth spending some time with, if you're comfortable knowing that there will be some issues along the way. A sequel is probably never going to happen, and it might not need to the way the story ends, but a similar tale in the same world or with similar ambitions, with refined gameplay aspects and maybe some modern inclusions like a branching dialogue tree or disjoint character choices could be genuinely enthralling. As of now, Grim Fandango lives on as a time capsule of late-90s game design, for better or worse.