Review: ‘Grim Fandango Remastered’ Reanimates Some Really Funny Bones
One of the best games ever made about the afterlife has finally got one of its own.
After 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.
The game’s status as a masterpiece has been cemented by time. 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. But for a long time, it’s been difficult to play the game on modern systems. 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.
The new Grim Fandango Remastered ($15 for PC, Mac, PS4, PS3, and PS Vita) redresses that injustice. It also presents two questions. 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?
As it turns out, Grim Fandango is still a good — often great — video game. But the years have been kinder to its artistic components — story, art direction, writing, audio — than to its gameplay and interface.
For 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. 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.
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. No game before or since has looked like Grim Fandango: It’s absolutely unique. Allowing for the technical limitations of its time, it looks good enough to be a movie. This is Pixar-quality design in a 1998 adventure game package.
The writing and voice acting are first-rate, too. Tony Plana brings a resigned grace to the voice of Manny and is ably assisted by supporting players like Alan Blumenfeld (gigantic mechanic Glottis) and Patrick Dollaghan (Manny’s annoyingly alpha co-worker Domino). The dialogue is sharp, clever, and breezy, winking at genre clichés while moving the story along briskly.
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.
Games aren’t all sound and visuals, though. 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). To say that these games are hard doesn’t quite cut it. 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.
Solving these puzzles is, as Salvador Dalí once said of painting, either easy or impossible. Forget the slow, methodical ratcheting up that teaches players the game mechanics. Grim Fandango is tough from the outset and periodically gets insane. 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.
The awkward interface doesn’t help either. In a way, this 1998 game has a more primitive interface than its 1980s forebears. Playing Zork, I could type something like “pick up the letter and put it on the table” and the game would understand that. But with Grim Fandango, you have to figure out how to boil your actions down to an extremely simple vocabulary of click options that’s mostly limited to “use,” “pick up,” and “examine.”
Because the game was made in an era before its lavish locations could be rendered in real-time 3D, all of the settings are static, viewable only from predetermined angles. This can make moving around disorienting, as the camera abruptly switches perspective (sometimes even within the same room, depending on your location). The camera choices seem to have been designed for visual impact more than for user convenience. And when you enter a new area, you’ll likely fall into the habit of hovering your pointer around the screen until it changes, indicating something you can interact with. That’s playing the interface, not playing the game.
Still, flaws aside, the puzzle solutions (when reached honestly) impart a hefty dopamine drip, and you’re tugged onward by a desire to see what new locations and characters the designers have in store. You find yourself drawn back to Grim Fandango even when you know it’ll bring frustration.
The Remastered version delivers some nice extras, too. The director’s commentary, featuring lead designer Schafer and several members of the game’s original team, is full of interesting details about what inspired particular design choices in the game. It’s also refreshingly not dumbed-down. These are professional game developers talking in their own lingo and not bothering to slow down to make sure you can keep up. For would-be game-makers and big fans of the game, it’s a must-listen. There are also about a hundred pages of original concept art to flip through, though you’ll need to complete the appropriate levels to unlock them.
Bottom line, it’s a very good thing that Grim Fandango Remastered exists, and not only for the historical interest. If you can tolerate the interface annoyances and occasionally obtuse puzzles, it’s unequivocally worth the $15 asking price, a singular experience that fans of adventure games shouldn’t miss. Here’s looking at you, Mr. Calavera.
What’s hot: Unique; impeccable design, story, and voice acting; informative developer commentary
What’s not: Clunky interface; arbitrary puzzle logic
You can email Gordon Cameron here.
