Grim Fandango deftly combines aspects of Mexican artwork with Art Deco architecture and a spot-on pastiche of Film Noir to create a wholly distinctive style – one that has held up incredibly well over the last 17 years. It’s a rare game that can manage both huge scope and tight pacing, but Grim Fandango pulls it off Oftentimes several puzzles will present themselves at once, and parts of their solutions may be strewn across half a dozen screens, but as each Day of the Dead comes to a close players will be able to tie up all their loose ends and enter the next gauntlet of puzzles fresh. Because the game is effectively divided into four sections, it’s able to feature both a long, world-spanning storyline and large, open-ended areas without feeling overwhelming. The four year story structure ends up doing wonders for Grim Fandango‘s puzzle design. Fortunately, such puzzles are few and far between, and the rest of the game plays host to some solid headscratchers. Puzzles that require exact timing or positioning are finicky at the best of times, and often require irritating repetition to complete. By and large the game strikes a good balance between challenging and guiding you as a player, though there are some points where it fails miserably. Whether you’re clearing a roof of pigeons, tricking out your Ed Roth-inspired hot rod with shocks, or trying to steal company secrets from the mail room, you’ll need to think on your feet and use your intuition in order to succeed. Good writing is the tentpole that holds up any adventure game, but it helps that Grim Fandango is stitched together from a fabric of inventive and challenging puzzles. Strong voice acting helps to bring the characters to life across the board, but in particular Tony Plana’s dry wit as Manny and Alan Blumenfeld’s overzealous insanity as Glottis earn a lot of laughs. Throughout their journey the pair encounter dozens of characters, from conniving a mobsters to a idealistic revolutionaries, each one memorable in their own way. His best friend and mechanic, Glottis, is a literal speed demon, driven by a single-minded obsession with driving and prone to bouts of hilarious melodrama. Manny is among the most charismatic leading men in gaming, a Hispanic Humphrey Bogart in a cheap suit who approaches most challenges with a confidence rarely seen in adventure protagonists. Tim Schafer is one of the funniest writers in the game industry, and the dialogue here brims with clever one-liners, but it’s his mastery of character writing that makes the game truly come alive. Seventeen years on, this is still one of the most original and well-written plots ever put to polygon. In doing so he uncovers a conspiracy to steal train tickets from their rightful owners, and sets out on a four year journey of his own to save Mercede’s soul and set the underworld straight On the Day of the Dead, Manny decides to change his ill fortune by stealing one of Dom’s premium clients – one Mercedes Colomar. Unfortunately Manny has been saddled with a seemingly-endless string of deadbeat clients, while his colleague Domino Hurley gets all the rich, dead saints. The quality of these packages depends on how good the clients were in life, with the kindest souls earning a ticket on the Number Nine Express – a train that makes the journey in just four minutes. In order to work off a Karmic debt for sins he committed in life, Manny earns commission selling travel packages to aid the deceased in their four year journey through the Land of the Dead. He also happens to be dead – something he has in common with most of his clientele. Manuel Calavera is everything you’d expect of a travel agent fast-talking, charismatic, and able to put a positive spin on just about anything. That’s really saying something for what’s considered by many to be the greatest adventure game of all time. With improved lighting and textures, entirely re-orchestrated music, and reworked controls, Grim Fandango Remastered is better than the original in almost every conceivable way. Now that I have the game in my hands, I’m more than a little impressed. It’s one of the first adventure games I ever played and less than a year ago I was poised to write a Graveyard piece about adventure gaming’s most beloved commercial failure, but then Sony and Double Fine surprised us all by announcing an HD Remaster at E3 2014. It feels strange to be sitting here, writing a review of Grim Fandango.
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