"Its genius and its importance only become clearer with time."

This is my second review of Grim Fandango. This first, submitted in 2004, hailed the game's script, voice-acting and music, criticised the slightly clumsy keyboard controls and concluded that overall it merited an 8/10, which is "great, with some minor flaws" in GameFAQs-speak. Looking back, I think that score was too low. The flaws are there, definitely, and they're not totally irrelevant, but they are more than outweighed by a script and presentation that make the strongest case yet for videogames as a storytelling medium. A decade after the game's release, I still play Grim Fandango on a regular basis, and here I'm going to try and explain why it deserves every gamer's attention.

Dead rising

In Day of the Tentacle and more recently in Psychonauts, Tim Schafer showed a flair for twisting together the mundane and the bizarre, so it's not surprising that a similar conceit forms the basis of Grim Fandango's world. Drawing on Aztec ideas about the afterlife, the game imagines that when you die, you have to travel across the Land of the Dead to your place of eternal rest. Fortunately, you don't have to do it by yourself: a post-mortem travel agency, the Department of Death, is on hand to sell you a luxury travel package so you can reach paradise in style. Just make sure you didn't do anything bad when you were alive, though, or you'll end up making the trip on foot.

The game's story follows Manny Calavera, a travel salesman at the DoD who's trying to work off his sins by selling the best packages available to the newly-dead. The thing is, he never seems to get any decent clients, while his rival Domino has nuns and saints up the yin-yang. Something fishy's going on, and it's up to you to figure out what.

Use Hamster with Microwave

Grim Fandango's an adventure game. If you know what that means, skip to the next paragraph. If not, here's a quick explanation: the gameplay involves solving puzzles by taking or manipulating objects and talking to the characters in the different environments of the game in order to complete the objectives that the story gives you. So, for example, you need to get into the wine cellar of a restaurant, where some stolen cash is being kept, except that the guard won't let you through. So, you need to hide in a wine barrel. The thing is, the only barrel close by is full, and the waiter keeps stopping you each time you try and empty it. You have to find a way to get rid of the waiter using the items available to you and the environment you're in. You're holding a metal pole. The waiter keeps going into a pantry. Shut the door when he's in there and slip the pole through the handles to lock him in. Easy.

The difference between this game and most other adventures is that instead of clicking a range of options at the bottom of the screen to get Manny to do stuff (Walk To, Pick Up, Talk To etc – known as the SCUMM engine), you move him around with the keyboard, and can either Examine items with E, Use Items/Talk to People with U or access your inventory with I (the GrimE engine). It's a pretty simple and intuitive system and works perfectly well most of the time. One quite irritating flaw, however, is that because the backgrounds are pre-rendered, while Manny is in proper polygonal 3D, it can be difficult to get him into certain entrances, particularly when running around. Also, because you control Manny with the keyboard rather than just clicking where you want him to go, taking him back and forth between places to get items or talk to people can be frustrating, especially because some of the areas are big and useless. It was a good idea to try and replace SCUMM with something simpler, but overall it's hard to see what advantage the keyboard controls provide over stripped-down mouse controls like those found in the original Sam & Max game.

With that said, though, the gameplay is not just solid but excellent. The puzzles are logical without being predictable, and put together with the assured flair that only comes with the kind of practice you get making games like Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle. Total newbies might find this a tricky title to cut their adventure game teeth on, but everyone else will find a thoughtfully-constructed game that offers decent challenge and length, particularly by today's dubious standards.

“She must have been beautiful with skin.”

Grim Fandango comes into its own in its presentation and script. It's not great to look at – time hasn't been kind to a game which was graphically pretty ropey even when it came out – but there's enough detail in the art deco-inspired backdrops for them to immerse you in the murky, menacing world in which the game is set.

The writing is unbelievably good, even for Lucasarts, whose adventure titles set the bar for game scripts throughout the Nineties. Grim Fandango takes the dry humour of its forebears – classics like Monkey Island - and laces it with a darkness and menace drawn from the game's morbid subject-matter, which makes for some gloriously mordant one-liners.

What makes the script stand out most, though, is its faithfulness to its chosen dramatic style – film noir – and the fact that the characters are fleshed-out and believable despite the fantastical setting. The drama comes from realistic emotional responses to events rather than jarring plot twists or clumsy expositions. You quickly come to care about what NPCs are saying and why they're saying it. That's a very important thing, not just because so many games these days are written so badly, but also because it helps Grim Fandango get away with one of the main problems with its genre: trial-and-error. When you're stuck for what to do next in an adventure game, there inevitably comes a point when you just try using every object with everything else and speaking to everyone about everything you can speak to them about. That's just as true here, but the sharpness of the writing makes it the process of exhausting all your dialogue options that much more bearable.

The voice-acting is similarly excellent, putting most titles out today to shame, and helps to accentuate the drama in the script without ever coming across as overcooked or cheesy. The cut-scenes, too, complement the drama without ever interfering with the gameplay, a skill that seems all the more impressive with the recent release of Metal Gear Solid 4. The music is simply superb. A clever and appropriate mixture of Latin, jazz and swing numbers, it does an extraordinary job of maintaining the game's style and feel even when there's no dialogue.

Verdict

Although it's as playable an adventure game as any, Grim Fandango is more than just an appropriately-themed swansong for this dead genre. It's a comprehensive lesson on how to write and deliver a story in a videogame. For all the cinematic pretensions of the current generation of games, there's very little that even comes close to this.

10/10

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 09/30/04, Updated 06/23/08

Game Release: Grim Fandango (EU, 1998)