Grim Fandango - Year 2, metal detector, forklift, VIP pass, betting slips, dog tags, baster From metal detectors to betting slips, our Grim Fandango walkthrough continues with a simple guide to. Grim Fandango's epic story of four years in the life (or death) of Manny Calavera, travel agent to the dead, has been remastered to look, sound, and control even better than when it won GameSpot's.
Comedy is one of the most difficult things to convey in video games. This is partly due to the pacing. A great deal of comedy is about timing, and when the audience is in control of how fast things play out, comic timing can be finicky and unpredictable.- This walkthrough for Grim Fandango is a comprehensive guide and includes significant spoilers. However, if you do not want the game spoiled, each year page (Year One, Year Two, Year Three,.
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Maybe that's why adventure games seem like the perfect place to make people laugh. In the days before The Walking Dead, point-and-click adventure games acted like coin operated dialogue machines. Input a puzzle, and a ready-made bit of conversation dispenses in capsule form—perfect and unaltered by the player's actions.
Tim Schafer is often credited with being one of the funniest people in video games for good reason. It could just as easily be said, however, that he was one of the first to recognize adventure games' inherent usefulness as a comedy tool. Grim Fandango was the last adventure game Schafer worked on as part of the now-defunct LucasArts, and its commercial failure represented the end of a golden age for the genre, cementing the game’s legend in certain circles.
Grim Fandango’s near-mythical stature has only increased by the fact that the game has never been re-released or ported to modern hardware since its initial release. Scarcity makes the heart grow fonder, in this case, and so the adventures of protagonist Manny Calavera, Meche, and Glottis through the Land of the Dead have become the perfect candidates for this new 'remastered' edition.
Grim Fandango Remastered Walkthrough
Graphical and pacing hitches
It doesn't hurt that this Day of the Dead-inspired comedy has an art style which translates well into today’s higher resolutions. Grim Fandango was coded in an era where polygons were actually recognizable as such: characters are blocky, flat, and monochromatic, obvious even under the new shaders, retouched textures, and sharper corners of the remake.
Most games of the era suffer when upscaled to hi-res displays, but Grim Fandango was smartly (or perhaps unintentionally) future-proofed against this kind of issue. The game’s piñatas, skeletons, and the Land of the Dead's bureaucratic concrete are already flat, while the pulpier, art deco backgrounds never needed to change at all. What Remastered does is remove any jagged aliasing, and it sharpens the colors in such a way that makes the game appear more 'true' to its target aesthetic.
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Unfortunately, there is a significant selection of graphical bugs that mar what would otherwise be the definitive version of this 17-year-old classic. Held objects float with gravity-defying stubbornness, for instance, and whole chunks of character models seemingly dislodge themselves momentarily during conversation. These bugs are all the more distracting now that the game is being rendered so much more crisply and cleanly. It’s hard to focus on a line’s humorous delivery when the character delivering it has a mouth guard floating two feet in front of his teeth.
Grim Fandango also suffers in retrospect thanks to nearly two decades of advancement in video game pacing. 1998 wasn't just a time of low-fidelity graphics. It was also a time when players had a lot more patience for adventure game puzzles—or at least I did.
The thing is, Grim Fandango is slow. You'll walk into a room, fill Manny's infinite inner pockets with pseudo-random trash, and leave, only to return and repeat the process multiple times if you missed some important cue and need a fresh batch of expended items. All the backtracking and the guesswork is made worse by all the just-longer-than-I'd-like animations: climbing, walking, and even unfolding Manny's reaper scythe all slow things down just a tad too much for my tastes.
Since Grim Fandango didn’t have highly expressive faces to help sell a scene, it made sense for the game to have broad, sweeping movements to convey the characters’ personalities. Add that to the plodding, often esoteric puzzles, though, and there are some lengthy pauses between depositing that kernel of effort and receiving the capsule of a joke.
Just be sure to save after every long pause. For whatever reason, Grim Fandango Remastered Gemini wars. has not added the kind of autosave feature that’s become practically standard for games in the last few decades. That usually wouldn’t be much of an issue in the relatively consequences-free world of an adventure game, but occasional game-freezing bugs make frequent manual saving a necessary chore. Grim Fandango's dialogue may be fun, but it's less endearing when you have to backtrack through 45 minutes worth of those long animations just to get back to where you were.
AdvertisementHumor and heart
That said, when those jokes do land they're still seriously amusing. Grim Fandango is a wonderful example of Tim Schafer at his finest, and the game will bring warm chuckles to anyone who’s played The Secret of Monkey Island or Psychonauts. The humor and heart is audible in every exchange, whether it's with an angry, dead clown channeling Jack Nicholson or an elemental spirit raised for the sole purpose of supercharging town cars.
The space between the exchanges is filled with a pulp-action spectacle on a scale that seems all the larger for the fully-realized world it takes place in. There are rules and borders to the Ninth Underworld, and even though those rules are ridiculous and broken as quickly as the characters can explain them, they give a sense of space that makes you care for the world’s inhabitants.
Much credit has to go to those characters' voice actors, whose deadpan delivery sells the insanity. Their lines, along with the game's music, have also been remastered for Remastered, and this comes off sounding as good as the game (usually) looks.
There’s also a director's commentary that can be turned on with the press of a button, featuring Schafer alongside programmers, artists, animators, and designers talking about the individual inspirations that led to various choices in the game's design.
The commentary isn’t unwelcome, and it's often quite an interesting look into how a passion project like Grim Fandango comes together, but it just isn't particularly well-implemented here. Once activated, you're treated to a several-second blurb about pneumatic tubes or a particular mural. Leave the scene showing that particular object, however, and the commentary stops, meaning you have to stand in place and wait for the commentary to finish before move on to the next scene.
Grim Fandango Remastered Walkthrough Ign
These and other 'remastered' elements of Grim Fandango Remastered aren't perfect, but neither is the original game, as it turns out. Its ponderous pace often gets in the way of its stellar personality, in fact. That doesn’t mean you should shy away from a slice of gaming history, though. When the game does hit its marks, it's with the same verve that its legacy promises.
The good
- Art and personality have aged well, even after 17 years
- Music and voice acting sound better than ever
- New director's commentary, while stiffly implemented, is very interesting
- The snappy dialogue: 'Did you kill much when you were alive?' 'Very little.'
The bad
- Slow pace and obtuse puzzles weigh the dialogue down
- Bugs ranging from visual to game-breaking mar what should be the ideal Grim Fandango
- No autosave feature
The ugly
- I spoke to an elemental handyman whose cheeks exploded into his own mouth for a moment.
Verdict: If you can survive the rough edges, it’s a great chance to finally see what all the fuss is about or relive an adventure classic.
Check out our Reviews Vault for past game reviews.
I’m in the weird position of having to review my favorite game.
Grim Fandango originally came out for PC in 1998. It was clever, funny, beautiful, and exciting. Even though it wasn’t initially a huge commercial success, it earned plenty of love from critics (like me now) and adventure gaming fans (like me then). Now, it’s getting a facelift thanks to Double Fine Production’s Grim Fandango Remastered, which is out today for PlayStation 4, PS Vita, PC, Mac, and Linux.
Now, if you really wanted to point (and click — ha) a gun to my head and make me score this masterpiece, I’d be very tempted to heap as much praise on it as possible. However, the actual remastering does produce a few flaws for me to talk about.
Above: No, she doesn’t have any messages for you.
What you’ll like
Still a classic
Grim Fandango is as wonderfully imaginative today as it was in 1998. You play as Manny, a grim reaper/travel agent who works in the afterlife. He eventually gets caught up in a web of lies and intrigue, resulting in a years-long journey for redemption and justice.
Being an adventure game, Grim Fandango is more about puzzles than action. You have to explore your environments, collect items, and talk to strange characters if you want to progress. If that sounds dull, it shouldn’t. The hilarious script constantly keeps things entertaining, and Manny is as likable a lead as you’ll find in any game.
Grim Fandango manages to skip around genres. It’s largely a comedy, but it has a sincerity and darkness that makes it much loftier than a Monkey Island or Space Quest. Really, it’s an epic, largely thanks to the scale and scope of the game’s world and adventure.
New control options
In the original Grim Fandango, you controlled Manny much like you would a tank. He could turn left and right and move forward and backward. Thankfully, these new versions give you more options. You can now move around with full analog control on every platform. The computer versions include point-and-click controls that will feel familiar to any fan of old-school adventure games. The Vita has a similar control scheme that uses the portable’s touch screen.
Honestly, each of these new options feel better than the original tank controls. You no longer have to waste time turning Manny left or right. Sure, the static camera can make the analog controls a little cumbersome since moving to a new scene changes your directional reference. Still, even after you waste a second adjusting, you’re getting around a lot faster than you would have in 1998.
Total war: attila - slavic nations culture pack download. Above: One of Grim Fandango’s trickier early puzzles.
Some of the new stuff
Grim Fandango always had a great, jazzy score. For the Remastered edition, Double Fine rerecorded the soundtrack with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. It sounds fantastic, and the music beautifully blends from scene to scene.
The Remastered version also comes with developer commentary. When turned on, you can listen to banter from the game’s original staff. It’s a fun feature for anyone who loves Grim Fandango or has an interest in game design.
What you won’t like
Not very remastered
Grim Fandango’s visuals did get an upgrade for the Remastered edition, but don’t expect a shocking difference. The character models look cleaner and the lighting is a lot fancier, but that’s it. Anything that was pre-rendered, including all of the backgrounds and cutscenes, looks exactly like it did in 1998. Thankfully, the backgrounds still hold up pretty well, but the cinematics are definitely showing their age.
Above: A graphics comparison.
I have to be honest. When I was originally playing it on the Vita, I barely noticed a difference at all. You can switch between the new and original graphics by pressing a button, but I could really only notice the new lighting on the Vita’s tiny screen. When I turned on the PC version, the high-res character models were much more noticeable.
Also, since the backgrounds aren’t updated, Grim Fandango isn’t available in a widescreen format (unless you stretch out the standard 4:3 ratio). Instead, you’ll either have to live with black or decorative borders on the side.
A few bugs
I mostly played Grim Fandango Remastered on the Vita, and I experienced a few bugs. A lot of them were small and graphical. A plume of smoke would appear behind a character’s head when they puffed on a cigarette when it should have been in front of them. Small objects, like cups, would flicker annoyingly. These problems always went away when I went back to the original graphics.
I also suffered at least one game-crashing bug late in the last quarter of my adventure. Since Grim Fandango doesn’t auto-save, I had to spend a little time backtracking to make up the lost progress.
Above: If you don’t want to stretch the visuals, you’re stuck with either those borders or black bars.
Conclusion
Grim Fandango is still one of the best stories anyone has ever told in a game. If you’ve never played the original, the convenience of a multiplatform release (and the better control options) really should push you to finally try this classic.
If you’re an old fan, don’t expect the visual upgrades to blow you away. Sure, Grim Fandango definitely looks better, but it’s not as significant an update as you’d get from Resident Evil HD or Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. But it’s still Grim-freaking-Fandango, the greatest adventure game ever made. And, after playing it for the dozenth time thanks to this new release, I can still happily confirm that it’s my favorite game of all time.
Score: 95/100
Double Fine provided GamesBeat with codes for the PlayStation 4, Vita, and Steam versions of the game for the purposes of this review.