Grim Fandango Remastered

Like the title says, I think this is one of the games, that haven't aged all that well, and I don't only mean the visual output. The story and athmosphere and certain wittyness is still there, but otherwise... Well, let's put it in this way: I can recommend the game. Especially, if you loved the game back in the days, you'll probably still love playing thru it a lot. But new comers or people who weren't that into it for some reason back in the days, might want to prepare to be a bit disappointed. Trying to put a pros/cons list up with a fresh eye, not hanging on memories: Pros: + Story/athmosphere, especially for noir fans. + Mostly really good voice acting and dialogue writing, that still is top notch stuff. + Mouse controls: finally! Thank you! Makes the experience so much more fluent. Cons: - For a LucasArts game, there are surprisingly many unlogical/far fetched puzzles. - A LOT of "empty" locations, which leads to a LOT of running around and downtime. - The inventory system is still a very unintuitive and slow, and is a huge barrier against solving some puzzles, especially the unlogical ones. - Location/level design in (especially) Rubacava is honestly quite bad. A lot of times you feel disoriented, almost lost, not remembering which way leads to where. - Bugs... save often! :P

Grim Fandango seems to be one of those games that every P&C lover should have played, but unfortunately, I never did. This remaster is a second chance and I’m writing this from the perspective of someone who likes a decent P&C every now and then. The graphics are decent, considering the original material. The style reminds me of LEGO Island, with a mix of noisy 2D backgrounds and crude 3D models. The models are alright, but the backgrounds are underwhelming. Sometimes the poor rendering will make it difficult to spot hotspots, resulting in much-despised (by me) pixel-hunting. However, the graphics do manage to create immersion. The voice acting and script are perhaps the best parts. Many characters have lots of phrases and you’re often enticed to listen to all of them due to the dry and dark humour of the game. The story in itself is not particularly complex however and often fades away in the puzzles. At times you will lose some focus, as the story frequently invokes a sense of urgency that isn’t reflected in the gameplay. The by far weakest parts of the game are the terrible inventory controls. The character needs to hold something first before he can use it on a hotspot and he needs to put it away again before he can use or do something else. The inventory is a fullscreen menu that only shows one item at a time, you flip between items one by one, either left or right. There are points in the game where you will have lots of (irrelevant) items in your inventory and you can lose track easily. Trial and error is thus discouraged and it can lead to some serious time sink at several points in the game. Overall, I think this game is a decent P&C that, while old-fashioned, still gets to you with its bone-dry and morbid humour and fitting graphics. However, due to the poor inventory controls, the game suffers a lot, especially in gameplay. Looking back, I wouldn’t want to play it again, but I’m glad that I can say that I’ve played one of the often-mentioned classics.

Really poor resmastering.. just to make cash.. -_- Back drawings are the originals, and so it is for the sound and voices. You play in 4:3 aspect ratio, but if you don't mind playing with stretched image, you can swith in 16:9... yeah you read right, they are kidding us putting a 16:9 option in the "special features" option menu, and when you choose it you can see a wonderful stretched 16:9... The only thing they did is remaking the characters model.. well, you had really hard work out there. I'm glad Grim Fandango is out again, I'm just saying that if you do a remastering and ask money for that.. well.. DO the remastering, not pretend to!!

First off, Grim Fandango is a great game and you should definitely play it if you have not done so already. This comment is spoiler free. However, what double fine "released" here is a buggy mess. The few changes that really needed to be made like the inventory and glitches were not done and while I can understand that one would not redo all the backgrounds to up it to 16:9, it is a shame that they did not even take the time to remodel all the characters with better resolutions. ( Manuel's Boss in the locker scene is a pixely mess) The commentary would be a nice addition. Sadly you sometimes need to stand in one exact spot to activate it and now I even ran into a problem that the 'radio being fixed' noise overrides the commentary. The text displayed when the commentary is played back does not resemble the actually spoken text and does not display the right parts at the right time. They did not even take the time to fix many obvious graphical errors that were quite common at the time. Like when Manuel waves two objects in front of a camera and the objects are just floating in the air. Or when objects are handed over to other characters they often appear on the other character model and for half a second the object is actually duplicated before blinking out. This needed far more polish and if you hoped for anything near the Monkey Island reworks, you will be disappointed.

I have been waiting for this remaster for 15 years, how could they screw it up so badly? The game doesn't run, no matter what I do. I researched my issue online and found it that it is very common, and with no way to resolve as of now. And that's just the one I have been experiencing. People have been struggling with missing sprites, bad performance, choppy music, unresponsive controls, bad mouse movements and whatnot. Each of these issues has been reported by dozens of users! And that's before several recurring in-game bugs which force you to restart the game! It feels like the effort that went into releasing a usable, unbroken product was far suppressed by the amount of resources that went into publicizing this dysfunctional piece of crap. As a long standing fan of Lucasarts I feel like they were harping on my nostalgia to milk me of my money with minimal effort. That's a shameful way to treat your fans, Double Fine, you should be ashamed. Your remaster is bad, and you should feel bad.