Place: City of El Marrow,
in the Eighth Underworld. Time: possibly
the 1940s. It is Día de los Muertos or the Day of the Dead. And since
this is the Land of the Dead, everyone is on vacation, visiting relatives in
the Land of the Living. Almost everyone that is.

Our hero Manuel Calavera
(a.k.a. Manny) is working. He’s a travel agent at the Department
of the Dead, affectionately known as the DOD. His job is to reap
the souls of recently deceased people and sell them travel packages.
After death, people need to cross the Land of the Dead to get to
the Ninth Underworld, their final destination. Depending on how
good lives they led, they qualify for one of the travel packages.
Walking stick, ride in a padded coffin, steamer… and the souls
of the saints and near-saints qualify for a ticket on the famed
Number Nine express.

That is, most souls qualify
for some sort of travel package. Those who have some serious spots
on their records have to work off their debts to the society in
the Land of the Dead – for instance by acting as travel agents.
But people generally do not talk about what they did in the past
so we never learn what sort of debt Manny has to work off exactly.

At any rate things are
not going well for Manny Calavera. He can’t seem to be able to
get any good clients, which means he won’t get any commissions.
Strangely enough, other agents do not seem to have this problem.
Thanks to a little subterfuge, Manny finally snatches a first class
client: Mercedes “Meche” Colomar, practically a saint. She should
qualify for a Number Nine ticket. But something’s wrong – there’s
no double N ticket for her according to the DOD computer system
(yes, computers made it even to the afterlife).

Something’s rotten in
the Department of the Dead… and it’s not the corpses (they’re
all very clean skeletons actually). Manny is now in serious trouble
and what’s worse, Miss Colomar has taken off on foot without any
guidance or protection, and the journey is perilous. Manny (who
immediately took a liking to Meche – love is stronger than death
you know) blames that on himself. But his more immediate problem
is that his superiors are not happy with him at all.

In fact they probably
want to sprout Manny. A little explanation is needed here. While
everyone is obviously already dead, that doesn’t mean things can’t
get worse. If one’s skeleton is destroyed, the afterlife is over.
And because it is not easy to damage skeletons with bullets made
of lead, the popular method of dispatching people is shooting them
with bullets filled with Sproutella, special compound formulated
to destroy bone through extremely fast growing vegetable life,
or “sprout” them. Dead people here look a lot like flower patches.

So this is Manny’s situation
– get away from the crooks running the DOD, if possible turn the
tables back on them, and find Meche. LucasArts calls it Grim
Fandango. The game was published in early 1999 (probably
just missed the Christmas market of 1998) and is widely regarded
as LucasArts’ last really good adventure game – and in fact one
of the best (if not the best) LucasArts adventures ever. It’s
not as funny as Day of the Tentacle,
not as zany as Monkey Island and
not as crazy as Sam and Max –
but despite (or perhaps because of) that, it’s good. Very good.

Grim
Fandango is practically dripping with style. Retro style.
The world of Grim Fandango looks like 1940s on an Aztec
trip – especially the architecture exhibits strong Aztec influence.
The Land of the Dead also seems to have distinctly Hispanic (Mexican?)
flavour. Cities have names like El Marrow, Rubacava or Puerto
Zapato. People have names like, well, Manuel Calavera. And Manny
even speaks with slight but clearly distinguishable Hispanic
accent and occasionally utters a Spanish word or phrase.

Manny will meet many allies
on his quest. Most important of them all is Glottis, Manny’s sidekick.
Glottis is a demon – an overgrown gremlin in fact (several times
larger than Manny). His sole purpose in life is engines – and he
can make them run really, really fast. Which will come in handy
since Manny has quite a lot of travelling ahead of him. Glottis
is, shall we say, a simple soul. Some players find him annoying,
other view him as endearing or funny.

There is quite a lot of
interaction with other people (and a few supernatural creatures)
as well – Grim Fandango definitely
isn’t a lonely game. Many people will help Manny, but others will
hinder him or even try to destroy him. Fortunately Grim
Fandango is a typical LucasArts game in that Manny can’t
die – but perhaps he’ll manage to sprout one or two adversaries.

The game is divided into
four parts which take place a year apart each, always on the Day
of the Dead. With the exception of the second year (which is the
most complex), the “chapters” are further split into several locations
as Manny travels through the Land of the Dead. The gameplay is
fairly linear overall, although the second year itself is as big
as a short adventure game and there is a decent amount of nonlinearity.
It is usually quite clear what Manny’s current goals and objectives
are, which is always a good thing.

Let’s examine the technical
side of Grim Fandango now. Graphics are a mix of
2D and 3D, so typical for many adventure games of the late 1990s
and early third millennium period. The 3D models are relatively
simple and perhaps even crude, but that is deliberate. All the
skeletons have a very stylized look, which is a good thing – I
imagine it might be quite difficult to tell realistically rendered
skulls apart. The camera switches between predefined angles, which
may be a little disorienting at first and take some getting used
to. It may also not be always immediately obvious where the exits
from a screen are, but it’s not a serious problem.

Controls are probably
the biggest weakness of the game. Grim Fandango is purely keyboard controlled
(Manny can actually be controlled with a joystick as well). And
the controls aren’t perfect. Finding the way sometimes is not entirely
easy and Manny has a tendency to “bounce” and turn around when
he runs into obstacles. Getting into doors also isn’t always exactly
smooth. Most annoying perhaps is the inventory system. There is
no “overhead view” showing all items. You can either go to particular
item by hitting a number – but you have to remember and/or predict
which number corresponds to which item at any particular moment
(not so easy). Or you have to “scroll” through the items one by
one. The controls are not an insurmountable obstacle but the convenience
of a mouse operated interface just isn’t there.

Sound on the other hand
is near perfect. The technical quality is excellent (the sound
is clean and crisp) and so is the voice acting. I especially liked
the voices of Manny and Meche. Even better perhaps is the music.
The Latin and retro tunes fit the atmosphere of Grim Fandango perfectly and contribute a
lot to the overall quality and feel of the game.

The puzzles in Grim
Fandango are quite varied. Some, but not nearly all, are
inventory based – and notably missing is the possibility to combine
inventory items. Other puzzles involve dialogue – I should mention
that there are often dialogue subtrees that need not be visited
but are worth listening to just for the fun of it. There are
no slider puzzles, mazes or other unpopular playtime lengthening
devices. The puzzles are well integrated into the storyline and
I never had a feeling that they were thrown in just to slow me
down. The difficulty is approximately “intermediate” – not totally
easy but not mind blowing either.

Most adventure gamers
agree that Grim Fandango is
one of the best LucasArts adventures and adventure games in general.
Quite possibly one of the top five adventures of all time, and
certainly in the Top Ten. The style, atmosphere, wit, creativity
and inventiveness are what makes Grim Fandango remarkable. No adventurer should
miss this game. One would almost say that “they don’t make them
like that anymore” – but fortunately that isn’t quite true. Grim Fandango is clearly an A class game
– and it could have been an A+ if it weren’t for the clumsy controls.
If you haven’t yet, go play Grim
Fandango now!

Final Grade: A

System Requirements:

• Windows
  95/98
• Pentium
  133
• 32
  MB RAM
• 4X
  CD Rom
• 2
  MB Video RAM
• Optional:
  3D Card