Grim Fandango Remastered

I picked this game because of the design. It reminded me of Book of Life and Coco, my favorite animated movies. Sadly, I am not good at point&click games, so it got very frusrtating at times. But the story was worth it. Manny's journey from a kinda selfish guy who just wanted to get back on top to basically a savior doing the right thing just because it was right was very well executed. Not to mention, he got some pretty funny comments. And one of the best side-kicks, imo! Glottis is just pure gold. Overall, I would say it is a pretty good, solid game. No bugs, no groundbreaking issues. Whenever I felt like playing I just dove right back in it. Imo, it's a nice game to laze around and watch a story unfold.

This game is simply amazing, one of the greatest adventure I've ever played. It's really long, puzzles are well balanced and intuitive, without being too easy. There are lots of dialogues, mouse and controller support (while tank-controls remains the best), interesting characters and an engaging story-arch that spans across several years. Also, do yourself a favour and play the game with audio commentary ON. It's extremely interesting and adds a lot to the value of this remaster. The only downside it's a common one with a lot of GOG releases from lazy devs: no trophies. Apart from that, this game it's worth every penny. Just buy it.

When I was a kid, I didn’t like being stuck in adventure games , so I often used guides. As I grew older, I realized that this beats the purpose and stopped doing it. Unfortunately, a few great titles fell victim to this bad habit. Not this one. Which says a bit about how motivated I felt to make progress. I played for some hours, put it away for a few months (or years), played some more hours, and so on. Anyway, the reason it took me so long is the poor clue design (always blame the devs). Most puzzles are logical given that you get the clues. And the game provides clues plenty, but these are often one-time dialogues, and usually you don’t realize that it was important, and you cannot revisit it. If you missed them, you are walking around cluelessly (badumtsss) left only with your common sense. And common sense will not get you far in this game. Perhaps this was just a problem for my easily distracted brain. I typically managed to get over an impasse when I started over and realized that some character earlier said something that was a clue. I think, in a good design the state of the world retains such clues. The problem with having tank controls is not that it is bad but rather that it had to pass through many decision makers before it got released. And the remastered mouse controls aren’t flawless either. The inventory is also annoying. The graphic boost is not much either but at least it prevents the game from becoming a pixelated mess on 4k monitors. It would have been good if they re-render the scenes in at least FullHD though. Essentially, from a technological perspective the game is subpar. Some bad ideas were implemented, and some good ones were executed poorly. Story-wise it is a decent noir adventure, at least the first half and the ending. The jokes land quite well too. It’s enough to carry the game on its back. Probably one of the worst Lucas Arts adventure games, but it still beats most adventure games from the last 2 decades.

When I first saw Grim Fandango in a game magazine, I wanted to play it. It's good that there was a demo back then. It just didn't start on my Pentium 1 with Windows 95, so I clicked on everything that was there on the Demo CD. Eventually I had some DirectX version installed that crashed the PC. - True Story! About 20 years later I got it from Humble Bundle and played it through. Really fun and exciting game, be sure to check it out. Link to my Story Movie: https://youtu.be/owbl8u4oUKw

Grim Fandango is in my opinion the best game ever made. The story, characters, and dialogue are the pinnacle of Lucasart's adventure games. It manages to legitimately elicit emotions from the player and stays with you long after the ending. The game's art direction is so good in combining film noirs with Mexican folklore that it manages to make 1998 graphics seem fresh even today and it also features one of the best game soundtracks ever, featuring some excellent big band and mariachi tracks. The voice acting is top-notch and along with the witty writing creates some lasting quotes. Lastly, the puzzles are actually fun, most of them provide the right amount of challenge, and although some moon logic is still present it is almost nonexistent. The remaster on the other hand is decent. The main advantage of it is the orchestral rendition of the soundtrack, which is truly something else and worth buying separately. The main problems with the game when it was firstly released were the bugs and controls. The remaster gets rid of the horrible tank controls and brings a more conventional point n click interface which is great. On the other hand, the bugs still remain, and at times even interfere with the point n click interface. Moreover, although the developers have improved the models' resolution, the backgrounds have remained the same and at times it becomes a bit distracting. It is possible that some of those original background assets were so over-compressed that they couldn't be salvaged so they went with keeping them the way they were. More playtesting was definitely needed to remove some of the bugs and optimize the new control scheme but even as it stands, it is still the best version of the game out there.