Grim Fandango (1998)

"Something's Rotten in the Land of the Dead... and you're being played for a sucker. Meet Manny Calavera, travel agent at the Department of Death. He sells luxury packages to souls on their four-year journey to eternal rest. But there's trouble in paradise. Help Manny untangle himself from a conspiracy that threatens his very salvation.

A FOUR-YEAR JOURNEY THROUGH OVER 100 EXOTIC LOCALES
AN EXTRAORDINARY EXPERIENCE WITHIN 3D ART DECO AND AZTEC-INSPIRED ENVIRONMENTS
A WEB OF INTRIGUE 50 CHARACTERS DEEP
A SHOCKING PORTRAIT DRAWN WITH 7,000 LINES OF REVEALING DIALOGUE
HUNDREDS OF CHALLENGING PUZZLES FOR ALL ADVENTURERS
A SMOOTH, SEAMLESS INTERFACE PUTS YOU SMACK IN MANNY'S WORLD
A LUSH ORIGINAL SCORE FEATURING SWING-ERA BEBOP AND JAZZ"

Lucasarts put out some of the best adventure games on the home platforms but Grim Fandango was a huge misstep and didn't do very well. After the like of Fate of Atlantis, Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle, the switch to cgi esque background graphics with the 3d models was jarring and the noir setting didn't really pull you in and it wasn't really a point and click. Were just weren't ready for it. Those that did play it faced a a potentially slow and buggy experience on mainstream hardware of the time where any other Lucasarts adventure game played just fine. Thankfully they got back on track with the next game Curse of Monkey Island.

The characters in the game are 3d models in a 2d world and controlled by keys or joystick. Movement is a bit strange and can be configures for one of two modes. Manny will look at items of interest and you can just press a button and have him move to where he is looking or use tank like controls to turn and move him forward and back. Inventory is managed by putting items in your suit and you can move through each item one at a time. It's a weird system and can be a bit cumbersome when you need to use items on other items. One annoying bug (Probably due to emulation) is that the inventory screen will freeze if facing an object. You will see me back off when near something when trying to get items out of my pocket to avoid this bug.

The longplay is a complete run through of the game (as you would expect) which can certainly be done much quicker than shown but I have attempted to show as much of the dialogue options as I can which has the knock on effect of dragging out some screens for ten minutes or more slowing the overall pace down especially in year 2.

Overall, this is a bit of a a marmite game. I have played it a few times but it's not one id call memorable that I must experience again sometime soon but it's by no means a bad game if you can look past it's technical issues. There are a few puzzles in the game that require some tight timing which can be annoying and slows progression. I'm just not a huge fan of noir style story telling. I do think it's trying to be as humorous as Discworld but not quite hitting the mark. It has it's fans but mot enough to stop it being the weakest game in Lucasarts catalogue.

Note: The game is being played in Dosbox running windows 95 simulating a Pentium 166. The game was never particularly well optimised and can run slow in certain parts for no apparent reason. The game always had some annoying bugs causing it to crash randomly but occur far more often playing in this environment. Year one was recorded using a later release that allows installing all files to the hd but there are issues with the game running this way causing problems with some animations so I resorted to the original release with update 1.01 applied running the game from cd for year 2 onwards which helped a lot with the consequence of slightly longer load times between scene changes. . (I didn't want to start over from scratch). 3D Acceleration didn't work so is being played in software mode. Some shadows look broken but that is probably due to emulation. Interestingly the 2015 remake had a lot of the same bugs and issue on release but were eventually fixed.

Uploaded in double resolution to avoid colour loss on text on dark backgrounds which unfortunately results in a larger file but I wasn't happy with native res result.

------ Year 1 -----
00:00:00 El Marrow
01:14:54 The Petrified Forest
01:33:13 Rubacava
------ Year 2 -------
01:43:29 Calavera Cafe
02:02:02 The Blue Casket
02:27:01 Feline Meadows
03:18:47 The Morgue
------ Year 3 -------
03:43:56 SS Lola
03:49:54 The Sea of Lament
04:01:10 The Edge of The World
------- Year 4 ------
04:46:48 The Temple
05:00:54 Rubacava
05:11:17 El Marrow
05:42:47 Greenhouse
05:54:29 Credits