Their preservation, warts and all, can be lowlights in Grim Fandango. They’re all horrible, and the remaster had every opportunity to update the controls. You will be driving cars, maneuvering forklifts and spinning vault locks. Like Full Throttle, Grim Fandango dabbles in gameplay that’s not just your traditional point-and-click. It’s symptomatic of modern gaming that we’re entitled enough to expect safety nets, speedier play and less abstraction, but – in this case – I think it’s justified. It feels like a regression for LucasArts adventures, and when you’re blindly looking around for something, anything to progress, it can be a chore. You will probably find you missed areas too, due to the labyrinthine nature and the poor signposting of potential paths. Rubacava is a nightmare a sprawling casino complex that requires you to walk everywhere, without any fast travel or Monkey Island-style maps for you to sprint through. This combos with the frankly huge sandboxes that Grim Fandango is capable of. An ash-tray bit still bemuses me, and I lucked through it. It’s not helped by several sequences being timed – you have to perform the action in a set window of time, and that makes the chance for error slightly too high. Walkthroughs will be your friend, as I challenge almost anyone to naturally know how to use the fork-lift truck to reach an incriminating briefcase, for example. You’ll stumble across some of them – why did opening the fridge cause the tattooist to stop tattooing? – while you won’t be as lucky with others. Individual interactions between items are a mixed bag, and probably make sense in a corner of someone’s mind, somewhere. It’s a journey that spans four years, petrified forests, casino outposts and an offshore mining rig. It’s the unravelling of a conspiracy, and Manny unwittingly tugs at the frayed ends as he looks to save her. She is sold a Nine Train package thanks to her good works, but she never gets on board. Since Casablanca and Film Noir are a hefty reference, everything is upended by the arrival of a lady – Meche – who Manny soon falls in love with. There’s a Glengarry Glen Ross feeling to the start, with Manny complaining that the best customers go to Domino, putting his job on the line. The richest go on the Number Nine Train, a bullet service to the Ninth Underworld, while the poorest are vacuum-sealed into coffins, or get a walking stick and compass to make the trip themselves. Customers buy packages based on the money they were buried with, and how many good works they did in their lifetimes. You play as Manny Calavera, a salesman grim reaper, cutting open body bags and cold-selling trips to the afterlife for the Bureau of Acquisitions.
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