Three and Out – ‘Grim Fandango’

LucasArts was a company well known for its interesting and compelling storytelling, and Grim Fandango is no exception to that reputation. This game is presented in a noir style based on the Aztec version of the afterlife, while also delving deep into some political commentary. Thoughtful puzzles are provided that have you influencing the world and trying to piece seemingly irrelevant things together. This influence and commentary leads to a wonderfully unique work to explore and take apart.

Every character has their own unique personalities, quirks, and fantastic voice acting. The main character, Manuel “Manny” Calavera, is a good-natured salesman who ends up in his situation purely due to the corruption of his workplace. Manny is joined by Glottis, a large demon who is a child at heart, exemplified by his constant ‘vroom vroom’ noises he makes while sitting in his hot rod of a car (which he suped up himself). While these are the main characters, even one-off characters and plot lines have so much thought and charm poured into them that they become memorable. A set of revolutionaries sit at an open-mic night and talk about “seizing the means of production”. A pair of child slaves are forced to work on light bulbs, yet still act like bratty kids and cry when threatened. These and more serve to create some unforgettable experiences. The humor is on point as well – providing just enough for some laughs, but not pushing the boundaries too far. I always got a good chuckle when something unexpected happens, like when I used a jackhammer near the aforementioned kids, causing them to panic.

It’s a good thing that everything is so memorable, because Grim Fandango asks you to remember many minor details and construct them in such a way to progress the storyline. The game is very unclear sometimes – it took me way too long to realize some things were interactable, even as early as the hole punch in the second room in the game. Some hitboxes overlap, meaning I thought that I couldn’t interact with a certain object that was required to progress. The world can also be unclear, as there were multiple instances that there was a location I didn’t know existed, which contained the next object or clue for the conundrums at hand. I was aware a cat litter box existed from a small cutscene, but I had no idea I could even access it so easily. This all compounds with a few glitches. For instance, one point late in the game soft-locks if you attempt to give a drink to Glottis while at the docks. But if you give it to him from inside a building instead, the game progresses as normal. In addition to all of this, there is no auto-save function. That means that, if you forget to save at one point and the game crashes (as it did once for me when I managed to simultaneously interact with an NPC and open my inventory), you’ll have to redo a few things to get back to where you were. Thankfully you can skip through conversations and the puzzles themselves don’t take very long. It can nevertheless be incredibly frustrating when that happens through no fault of your own. These issues constantly made me worry that I may have encountered a glitch, as opposed to simply not having the correct solution to the puzzle. But most of the time, it was simply that: I wasn’t thinking in the right way. That is the nature of point-and-click games at times, of course, yet doesn’t excuse Grim Fandango from the consequences.

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