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Mento

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The Comic Commish: Grim Fandango Remastered

By Mento 5 Comments

¿Qué onda, mi amigos? Welcome to the Comic Commish, making its triumphant 2016 return only a month late. I actually have very few games in my gift pile left to acknowledge, so this feature might have to undergo some changes. I still want to credit those that have helped me out in some way, whether that's by encouraging my writing here or sending me free stuff through Steam to build features around, though I may have to start getting creative with how I could go about doing that. Maybe invite cool folk to look at my Steam backlog and give them dibs on what I should check out next? It might seem a little odd to "reward" people by asking for their time to help me with suggestions, though. I'll think of something fun to do with this feature moving forward.

Check out last year's Commishes over here: Harvester - Long Live the Queen - Luftrausers - Papers, Please - NiGHTS Into Dreams - Syberia - Freedom Planet - STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl - Back to the Future: The Game - Undertale - Nuclear Throne.

Grim Fandango Remastered

No Caption Provided

In any mi casa es su casa (I know so much conversational Spanish, you guys), this month's - or rather, last month's - subject is the recently remastered formerly-LucasArts/presently-Double Fine adventure game Grim Fandango which arrives courtesy of fellow mods @gamer_152 and @sparky_buzzsaw, who simultaneously gifted me a copy last Xmas - I returned one of them with my thanks, don't worry. I've always felt that Grim Fandango's setting and script far outmatched its ability as an adventure game from a purely mechanical perspective, and - spoilers! - I'm still fairly attached to that opinion after a few hours with this remastered version.

That isn't to denigrate it too much, of course: Grim Fandango has a truly unique and brilliant setting that supposes an afterlife as perceived by Mexico's "Day of the Dead" celebrations and then attaches no small number of crime noir tropes to the tale of erstwhile grim reaper Manny Calavera and his years-long journey to find and assist "the dame what he did wrong", in a spin on the classic. Manny's a fantastic character: he has no immediately evident backstory, thanks to him mysteriously losing all memories upon death (which, somehow, is the exception rather than the norm in this world) and maintains a long-cultivated dry cynical wit and a litany of vices that often clash with his desire to do the right thing. Equally appealing is his right-hand demon and best pal Glottis: a giant orange monster with a penchant for tricking out cars and making impatient driving noises whenever he's on standby. I'd happily extend the same approbations to the rest of the skeletal cast as well, and to a lesser extent the creepy, expansive yet mostly empty environs of the game.

Anyway, I'll quickly run through a few screenshots - when covering an adventure game, I'm always loath to reveal too much of the story or the game's puzzles, though I think the statute of limitations for spoilers might have ended a decade ago - and then go deeper into my present and past feelings on the game, the changes in this remastered edition and how far I intend to get through Grim Fandango after completing this article. And, of course, the requisite comic. (Also, I think this is the third Comic Commish game in a row that prominently features skeletons - I sense a running femur here...)

Grim Fandango starts about as well as it possibly could with this slightly grainy noir title card. Mariachi skeletons and smoking: that's all you need to know.
Grim Fandango starts about as well as it possibly could with this slightly grainy noir title card. Mariachi skeletons and smoking: that's all you need to know.
Manny's depicted as a down-on-his-luck Shelley Levene-style
Manny's depicted as a down-on-his-luck Shelley Levene-style "salesman" early on: in the Land of the Dead, reapers are not only expected to escort the recently deceased down into the underworld, but to sell them their transportation to the blissful "ninth heaven" based on their worth as a human being. Naturally, Manny gets nothing but losers and scumbags, though the implication early on is that not everything is on the up and up.
The game's inventory system is one engineered to be slightly more immersion-friendly than most, as Manny picks through his coat for each individual item, but at the same time it adds a lot of unnecessary exasperation as you quickly scroll to find the item you want. It's one of several features in Grim Fandango that displays the game's emphasis on style over gameplay.
The game's inventory system is one engineered to be slightly more immersion-friendly than most, as Manny picks through his coat for each individual item, but at the same time it adds a lot of unnecessary exasperation as you quickly scroll to find the item you want. It's one of several features in Grim Fandango that displays the game's emphasis on style over gameplay.
Grim Fandango is linked together with dozens of pre-rendered backgrounds like this. Most have very little to offer besides a handful of hotspots that Manny can observe, if even that, while those crucial to the puzzles are often separated by many
Grim Fandango is linked together with dozens of pre-rendered backgrounds like this. Most have very little to offer besides a handful of hotspots that Manny can observe, if even that, while those crucial to the puzzles are often separated by many "nothing" transitions like the above. Manny will say something sarcastic about the marquee and that car over there, but all this screen does is serve as a buffer between the Department of the Dead offices and the balloonist clown down the road from whom we got the above Robert Frost balloon poet. This game has one too many roads that are frequently traveled by, alas.
Here's Glottis. The game's first puzzle is to figure out a way to get Glottis to become your new driver: the poor guy's been stuck as the DoD's mechanic for years, denied his true calling. Demons like Glottis are also elemental spirits which were called forth from the Land of the Dead for a specific purpose, and for Glottis that has always been to drive.
Here's Glottis. The game's first puzzle is to figure out a way to get Glottis to become your new driver: the poor guy's been stuck as the DoD's mechanic for years, denied his true calling. Demons like Glottis are also elemental spirits which were called forth from the Land of the Dead for a specific purpose, and for Glottis that has always been to drive.
The Land of the Living is depicted here as being as nightmarish to the dead as the Land of the Dead presumably is to the living. I actually forget how often you're required to come up here - I suspect it'll show up again further down the road - but our job here is to open this bodybag with our scythe and take the new stiff back home with us. Naturally, it's another loudmouthed deadbeat that we end up shipping off to the afterlife encased in packaging foam.
The Land of the Living is depicted here as being as nightmarish to the dead as the Land of the Dead presumably is to the living. I actually forget how often you're required to come up here - I suspect it'll show up again further down the road - but our job here is to open this bodybag with our scythe and take the new stiff back home with us. Naturally, it's another loudmouthed deadbeat that we end up shipping off to the afterlife encased in packaging foam.
Glottis has naturally turned the hearse-like company car into a ridiculous hot rod. You can see Tim Schafer's affinity for the heaviest of heavy metal vehicles in many of his games. Don't have to stare at this screen long to figure out where Brutal Legend came from.
Glottis has naturally turned the hearse-like company car into a ridiculous hot rod. You can see Tim Schafer's affinity for the heaviest of heavy metal vehicles in many of his games. Don't have to stare at this screen long to figure out where Brutal Legend came from.
He also has the lion's share of the game's best lines, yelled from the top of his lungs. I just tossed him from some spinny metal thing in the Petrified Forest - the game quickly moves on from the starting city of El Marrow for reasons I won't go into here - yet the guy's still stoked as hell that we just found some new shocks for the
He also has the lion's share of the game's best lines, yelled from the top of his lungs. I just tossed him from some spinny metal thing in the Petrified Forest - the game quickly moves on from the starting city of El Marrow for reasons I won't go into here - yet the guy's still stoked as hell that we just found some new shocks for the "Bone Wagon".
What follows is another general issue I have with this game. You can see from this screen that there are some keyboard controls for various in-game functions. Grim Fandango is a lot like the third Secret of Monkey Island game (The Curse of Monkey Island) in that you're generally limited to a
What follows is another general issue I have with this game. You can see from this screen that there are some keyboard controls for various in-game functions. Grim Fandango is a lot like the third Secret of Monkey Island game (The Curse of Monkey Island) in that you're generally limited to a "look", "use", "take" and "talk" commands that appear on a special context cursor when clicking on hotspots. Anyway, the operative button here is U, for "use" (or Select, I guess).
In order to get past some flaming demon beavers, who have been building their lodges out of skeletons like myself, you need to extinguish them as they jump into this bitumen river. There's no context menu for this one: you simply have to know to press the U key to start spraying the extinguisher before they leap off that bluff and disappear under the tar's surface. It's the first of a handful of times that you might get stuck on a puzzle because of a UI issue, rather than not being able to logic it out.
In order to get past some flaming demon beavers, who have been building their lodges out of skeletons like myself, you need to extinguish them as they jump into this bitumen river. There's no context menu for this one: you simply have to know to press the U key to start spraying the extinguisher before they leap off that bluff and disappear under the tar's surface. It's the first of a handful of times that you might get stuck on a puzzle because of a UI issue, rather than not being able to logic it out.
Even the least essential characters, like petty criminal Chowchilla Charlie here, has some wonderful dialogue if you take the time to sit and listen. In fact, almost all of the game's Steam achievements are based on talking to NPCs and exhausting their dialogue trees. The designers of those achievements certainly knew where the game's strengths lie, and it's one of those rare, great uses of achievements as a means for the developers to direct the player towards pursuing what the designers consider essential to the experience - like, say, the
Even the least essential characters, like petty criminal Chowchilla Charlie here, has some wonderful dialogue if you take the time to sit and listen. In fact, almost all of the game's Steam achievements are based on talking to NPCs and exhausting their dialogue trees. The designers of those achievements certainly knew where the game's strengths lie, and it's one of those rare, great uses of achievements as a means for the developers to direct the player towards pursuing what the designers consider essential to the experience - like, say, the "no guns" achievement of Mirror's Edge.
I left the game in the Casablanca-ish port city of Rubacava: the setting of the game's next big puzzle-solving set-piece and one of the largest areas in terms of screens to walk through. The game lacks a quick travel map, which is a bummer, and given so many of the screens are simply built for spectacle - like this great shot of the airship - it's a pain to move around. I actually recall now that I quit around this point the first time I played the game years and years ago.
I left the game in the Casablanca-ish port city of Rubacava: the setting of the game's next big puzzle-solving set-piece and one of the largest areas in terms of screens to walk through. The game lacks a quick travel map, which is a bummer, and given so many of the screens are simply built for spectacle - like this great shot of the airship - it's a pain to move around. I actually recall now that I quit around this point the first time I played the game years and years ago.

Grim Fandango Remastered leaves behind the same impression its original did, only now it comes at an inopportune time for comparisons after the one-two-three punch of Technobabylon, Life is Strange and The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 last December. Grim Fandango was released in a certain period of time when adventure games were collapsing under their own weight: far too much in the way of production and cinematography, too little in the way of satisfying, rational puzzles and ease of traversal. Grim Fandango's one of the best adventure games of the early 2000s, for whatever that accolade is worth, but in many ways it's a product of its time and falls into many of the same traps plaguing the FMV-laden games of this era. It does not have a particularly friendly UI, and it lacks appreciated convenience features like a "reveal hotspots" button or a quick travel map: features that were definitely already in existence back then. There's no denying it has one of the most appealing settings for an adventure game, and one of the best scripts to boot, but the actual game part leaves a lot to be desired.

The "Remastered" graphics mode does what all good remastered versions do: Make you think "Huh, that looks pretty much how I remember it" until you switch the graphics mode back to the original for comparison's sake. I think many recent graphically remastered games missed a trick by not giving you a side-by-side comparison mode that simply renders one half of the screen in the new look and the other in the old. Maybe that would be wholly unfeasible what with it requiring two rendering engines, but I've never let impracticality stand in the way of a cool idea. The game also does away with tank controls, which I'd completely forgotten were a thing in Grim Fandango. Who thought that was a good idea in an adventure game? I feel Resident Evil has a lot of crimes yet to answer for beyond "Jill sandwich", obtuse key puzzles, racism and Resident Evil 6.

Grim Fandango is always going to be one of those games that I wished I loved more. I'll no doubt see a few replies from folk who adore this game and consider it one of their all-time favorites, who will (politely) tear me a new one for disparaging it. While I've definitely played one too many fantastic adventure games recently that far outshine it in terms of puzzles and accessibility, even back in its day I just grew so tired of Grim Fandango's padding and slowly moving from one side of a giant map to the other when investigating that I was unable to complete it. I'll probably end up putting the bookmark right back where I left it and moving onto other things. Bloodborne, for example.

Before I jump from one game focused on death and onto another however, here's the comic:

No Caption Provided

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