Finishing Thoughts (Nostalgia Edition): Grim Fandango
A masterful classic
Since selling my Switch 2 (feels like a distant memory!) and acquiring a Steam Deck, and therefore having access to PC games again for the first time in about 20 years, I’ve been replaying a few classics from my early gaming days (see here for my thoughts on Day of the Tentacle), and Grim Fandango was another one.
Point and click adventure games were a big part of my early gaming years, and I remember me and my sister spending hours and hours solving the puzzles in Grim Fandango. Having completed it again, it remains an absolute classic that still, mostly, holds up.
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You play as Manny Calavera, in a world where souls who die have to find out what level of passage they’ve earned to the afterlife, depending on how they lived their lives. You are a sort of travel agent, trying to earn your own passage, who uncovers a conspiracy where people’s tickets are being stolen, leaving you to track down a client who could be your ticket out.
Basically, the game is magnificent, and it's hard to know where to start. It is brimming with charm. It contains all sorts of cultural inspirations, with each different set piece/location taking in different inspirations. There’s a Mexican/aztec day-of-the-day inspired city, as well as a Casablanca style jazz era where you run a crooked casino in a dinner jacket. All the characters you meet are unique, funny and interesting, and the voice acting is some of the best I’ve ever encountered in a game. And the music is wonderful, perfectly fitting the environments. The dialogue is witty and funny, and the overall plot is so bizarre yet manages to feel completely normal within the world of the game.
So basically, it is hard to fault. If I had to try, I think the only thing that I didn’t love was the pacing. You spend a long time in some very large areas, and then as the game progresses you end up spending less time in more and more areas. What this means is that in the early game, the puzzles are harder, as there are more items to collect and try to use to solve the various things you have to accomplish, but as the game progresses you find yourself increasingly in smaller areas with fewer puzzles and less potential ways of solving them, so the problem-solving starts to feel a little less challenging.
But that’s about it on the negs. It is a game from a golden era of Tim Schafer/LucasArts, one of my favourite game developers, responsible for Monkey Island, Full Throttle and, under Double Fine, Psychonauts. I played it with the developer commentary on, which was wonderful as I was able to hear about the design and creation process for each of the scenes and get a behind the scenes glimpse of what life was like back then making a game like this.
Give it a try!
