Death; it’s a laugh, isn’t it? All that toil and effort through life only to find that you’ve been dumped in the land of the dead with a world to travel before you can get to the cushy afterlife you’ve been promised all those years. Or such is the circumstance Tim Schafer imagined when he wrote and directed Grim Fandango with LucasArts back in 1998. This remastered game from his studio Double Fine does two important things. First, it proves that the core ideas, design and concept of this much lauded adventure game have lost none of their potency. Second, it gives everything just enough of a lift to make it a small treat for the modern era.
Typically 3D visuals don’t age all that well, certainly by comparison to how cool many pixel-art games look to this day, but Grim Fandango has stood up to the test of time graphically. A lot of the credit here has to go to the fact that it’s a wonderfully stylised world already and really very little has been done to smooth out its rougher edges than simply adding in some dynamic lighting. It’s a small touch that goes a long way however, helping to reveal new contours to the aged polygons. Some of the backgrounds and textures could be better, but it all seems in tune with rest of the setting. There’s no jarring new dropped-in assets and the creepy, noir vibe has been maintained.
What’s required no maintenance is the typically sharp, witty and varied script Grim Fandango enjoys. The quirky dialogue choices and banter of Manuel Calavera remain as enjoyable as ever as his relatively selfless quest to save a lost soul takes him on a circuitous journey through the land of the dead. Odd little circular conversations (such as asking a beat poet to keep on getting up on stage to repeat pointless prose) haven’t lost any of their surreal appeal. It might feel a little jarring to those coming to this game new, more used to objective-based chats with NPCs in BioWare games. Sometimes a chat is just a chat, but sometimes you need to exhaust the conversation before you get anywhere.
Frustration may well appear elsewhere, though. As is all too common with adventure games, the puzzles can often descend into trial and error as you keep on trying to interact with objects in the world with whatever you have lying around in your inventory. Such cul-de-sacs of logic aren’t all that common, but they come around and have lost none of their potent brain-befuddling power with the passing of time. Ultimately, though, its age has only given it a new layer of context that seems to enhance its fun and intrigue. Grim Fandango remains one of the best of its class and a wonderfully witty noir adventure.