Grim Fandango

Grim Fandango is not your usual adventure game, and honestly, that is probably the best thing it has going for it.

LucasArts is taking Mexican folklore, film noir, crime, corruption, and the afterlife, throwing it all into a blender, and somehow coming out with one of the strangest looking adventure games I have seen in a long time. You play as Manny Calavera, a travel agent in the Land of the Dead, stuck in a four-year search for redemption. That is a pretty big step away from the usual “find the key, open the door, repeat until bored” routine.

The game is expected to release in the fall of 1998 for Windows 95 on CD-ROM, with a price around $47.95.

Grim Fandango is designed by Tim Schafer, the mind behind Full Throttle and Day of the Tentacle, which should already get the attention of anyone who still cares about adventure games. The game features a bizarre afterlife setting inspired by Mexican folklore, but with a heavy film noir twist. It has 3D environments mixing Art Deco and Aztec-inspired design, 55 characters, over 7,000 lines of dialogue, hundreds of puzzles, and 90 locations to explore. That is not a small game. That is LucasArts coming in like they still have something to prove.

The evaluation version I received from LucasArts installed without any trouble, which is always appreciated. I have seen demos that fought harder during installation than the actual game did afterward, but Grim Fandango behaved itself.

Once the game started, the intro video immediately grabbed me. It does exactly what a good intro should do. It sets up the world, gives you a taste of the characters, and drops you right where the story begins. Pay attention to it, because when it ends you are not just watching anymore. You are standing right where the video left off, and the game expects you to know what is going on.

The puzzles can be easy or fairly difficult depending on how many adventure games you have played. If you grew up on LucasArts and Sierra games, you will probably understand the kind of strange logic it wants from you. If you are new to the genre, expect to wander around for a while clicking on everything like a maniac. Which, honestly, is half the point.

Grim Fandango uses Direct3D in the full version, but even without it the demo looks great. The graphics have a cartoony but believable style, and the environments are fantastic. The cities and buildings look like they were pulled out of a 1950s detective movie, then filtered through a dream about the afterlife. I tested the game on two machines: a Pentium 100 MHz with 48 MB of RAM and a 32x CD-ROM, and a Pentium II 333 MHz with 128 MB of RAM and a 36x CD-ROM. Even on the lower-end machine, the game held up better than I expected.

The art direction is what really sells it. This is not about pushing the most realistic graphics possible. It is about creating a world with style, and Grim Fandango has style crawling out of every corner.

The controls may be the best I have used in an adventure game so far. That matters, because nothing kills an adventure game faster than fighting the interface instead of solving the puzzles.

Grim Fandango could easily become one of the best adventure games of all time. The graphics are stylish, the sound and music fit perfectly, and the whole thing has a personality most games would kill for. This does not look like a lazy cash-in or some generic adventure game with a different coat of paint. It feels like LucasArts is trying to push the genre forward again.

For years, LucasArts has been known heavily for Star Wars games, but between Grim Fandango and the new Indiana Jones game, it looks like they are ready to remind everyone that they can do a lot more than lightsabers and TIE Fighters.

This one definitely does not look like a waste of your money this fall.