When I look back at the long list of point and click adventure games to have come from the 1001 list so far, I see a fair few titles that I actually want to play again. By 'play again' I mean 'carry on playing', and by 'actually want to' I mean 'have been surprised by and should ignore the fact that I groan when I come across the words point and click because there are now many more games I should'.
That's a long-winded way of saying that even with the ease of having a remastered version on two platforms, I still somewhat hesitated to get around to playing yet another LucasArts point and click adventure game, in the form of Grim Fandango.
I hesitated not because of the cast of characters who are nothing but skeletons and monsters, but because I didn't want to get frustrated by getting stumped on a puzzle, of which there seem to be many in this genre.
Despite the developers constantly saying that there are no fail states, and no ways to lose, I'm never filled with enough confidence to get stuck in and find out, frankly, what I'm missing. Because I've clearly been missing the likes of Grim Fandango.
Fun Times
We are swiftly introduced to Manny Cavalera, a travel agent at the Department of Death whose job it is to upsell the recently deceased into a shorter stay in the dumping ground between death and eternal rest. You could traipse around the afterlife for years as you walk your way to the Ninth Underworld, or - if you're lucky (read: rich) enough - you could hop onboard the Number Nine train and get there in just four minutes.
As introductions go, I wasn't expecting it. It sounded great and look fantastic and then I remembered I needed to drop the settings down to the original specs for that authentic experience. I even turned tank controls on.
And here we are, in Manny's office, with an urgent message informing us of a mass poisoning resulting in many deaths, and amongst those many deaths is bound to be someone who can cough up the money for an expensive express ticket to eternal rest... We better get going!
Unfortunately, I've no idea where the poisoning is, and I can't find my driver to take me there, and there's bound to be some puzzles to get in the way of this urgent message, which means it's time to soak in the scenery.
Grim Fandango is a mix of 3D character models with 2D pre-rendered backgrounds. For the most part, it's fine, but there are the odd cases of Manny doing lord knows what against invisible walls and turning where you least expect him to. The tank controls weren't necessarily my problem, because you do at least have control over walking or running (the walk is somewhat slow and the run is rather quick). Outside your offices is a nice empty street to get used to the controls, though.
There's also a clown blowing up balloon animals, and a bread stand blocking us off from the festivities of the Day of the Dead. I smell the elements of a puzzle and immediately steal whatever I can, as well as exhausting the dialog options, which are, once again, well written and rewarding.
Looking around, I spy an alleyway and a rope all the way to my boss' office, where I learn that he a) isn't in today, and b) has his computer hooked up to his secretaries intercom, such that he doesn't even have to speak to answer, meaning we can change what he says... if I ever manage to work out where the start of that puzzle is...
Frustrations
Within the first half hour or whatever, I can see so many things of note - helpfully because Manny will turn his head to track nearby interactive objects, giving you a heads up in an otherwise headless user interface - but I don't know in what order they are relevant.
I have so many balloon animals that some of them have to be used. I have a deck of cards because it was an object I could pick up, so I course I picked it up. I've got somewhere to head to, but don't know how to get there. Suddenly, Grim Fandango is living up to the nightmare that is me and not having a bloody clue what to do.
And then Manny turns his head in a corridor I've been through multiple times now, and I find a second elevator, this time leading to the garage...
Further Fun Times
A run across the garage and we're introduced to Glottis, my face lights up and my opinion of Grim Fandango swings back towards the positive end of the scale. I don't know why my face lit up. Must be the character design. A fat mechanic isn't anything new, but this one is a demon or something. A childlike, cartoony looking friendly demon who wants to drive my car, but rules are rules, and he can't even fit inside in the first place. We're going to need to solve some puzzles.
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| Aha! Need the bosses signature. |
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| Boss isn't in, he won't answer. Need to change his computer response to... |
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| Yes, that ought to do it. |
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| Thank you, Eva. |
With a car and a driver, I'm finally ready to respond to the urgent message about a mass poisoning. My job is at stake, so I better not screw it up.
I return from the land of the living - a disturbing mess of a place - with a new customer. A short, angry, skint customer. Not good enough. I'll need to see what my colleagues are up to.
No luck. But once again, bit by bit, the breadcrumbs fell into place. Interact with this, talk to that, use X on Y until Z happens. My inventory - accessed by pulling things out of my jacket on by one - starts accumulating stuff, all of it useful I'm sure, I just have to fit the right things into the right holes.
Convinced there is foul play concerning the message delivery system, I eventually figure my way into the room to mess around with it. My colleague, Domino Hurley, seems to have all the luck, and a clearly marked fancy red tube goes straight to his office - formerly my office. If only I could adjust the air pressure to intercept one of his messages...
Final Words
But I don't know how, and that's where I ended Grim Fandango. I remembered that I downloaded some kind of design document not too long ago, and wondered if it had anything to do with these puzzles. Maybe I could see what had changed and evolved during the course of development, or see how far I was through the game. Not very, I suspected, and not very, as I found out - this is just one of four years worth of story, and I'm barely a third of the way through it.
So how do I go about intercepting that message?
Punch some holes in the playing cards using the hole punch on Eva's desk that I once interacted with by accident, not even knowing it was there. It produced a nice little joke about feeling satisfied at having done it, and I filed it away into the 'nice dialogue' part of my brain, and not the 'potential puzzle solution' part. How will I ever learn?
Playing Grim Fandango reminded me first and foremost of Full Throttle, and then the likes of Indiana Jones and the Monkey Island series, for the sole reason of me being invested in the world and the story, and wanting to find out where it went, but not having the brains to put it together to get there unaided.
And yet, Grim Fandango somehow saw me find a lot of puzzle pieces on my own, and, in a roundabout and surprisingly not brute force method, I managed to eventually slot the right pieces into the right places. I wasn't furiously combining objects together, or trying to use a deck of cards or a balloon on every single thing in sight. I was, instead, thinking about it.
There's a locked door to the tube room that I thought I'd need to use a balloon on, to somehow slide the latch back to unlock the door. In that case, I was overthinking it - the solution was to wait for the door to be opened, lock it while it was open such that it can't close because the bolt is now in the way. Or, as the technician told me when I asked how he got into the room, "I just opened the door".
Grim Fandango is clever, it looks great (can't imagine what the remastered look looks like, even having glimpsed it at the start of the game), and I think stands as the best time I've had with a point and click. I'm not sure about that. That sentence is hard to quantify. It's up there, let's leave it at that.
History would go on to show that Grim Fandango wasn't enough to save a dying genre, but more history on top of that would show that Grim Fandango is still worth playing, twenty years later. I hope to find the time to get back into it - preferably before I have to take a trip on the Number Nine.
FILLING YOU IN
One Year Later (and then some) I finally get around to watching Grim Fandango, on the correct assumption that it'd be far easier than bumbling through it like the inept adventurer I am, and what an unusual story I got to see.
With a cast of dead characters you get to play around with the rules of the world beyond ours, and what starts as a weird story of Death as a salesman turns into a tale reminiscient of black and white cinema - not that I've watched a whole lot. Casablanca vibes, you know? You're not the greatest character on the surface, but somewhere inside you know what's right.
I can't speak to the difficulty of the puzzles, having seen no failure states or gameplay of players getting lost and confused, but I can speak to having had a good time watching a game like so few others. A game whose cast may be cliches and stereotypes, but of people you just don't come across in video games. It's a testament to what you can do in the genre, if you let yourself see where these weird ideas take you.
I don't remember whereabouts Grim Fandango landed in the various Top 10s, if at all, but I think after having seen it all it may be worth a lil bump up the rankings. It's definitely one you'll remember if you give it a go.
Fun Facts
Fascination with folklore and endless ideas drawn from it - many of which had to be cut, else development would have continued for years - eventually lead to a film noir set in the afterlife, staring a mundane office worker just trying to get by.
Grim Fandango, developed by LucasArts, first released in 1998.
Version played: Grim Fandango Remastered, PC, 2015
Version watched: Grim Fandango Remastered, PS4, 2015 (ALEX)