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
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 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: