Today’s game is a product of that strange transitional period in computer gaming, where point-and-click adventures were still popular, but 3D graphics were seen as a requirement – more by the developers than by the players in my experience though. “Grim Fandango” joins in with its very own story – let’s talk about how I liked the result here.

Although I classify the game as point & click, the original version from 1998 technically wasn’t that – you always controlled the main character directly using a joystick or keyboard. Our remastered version would also have supported mouse control, but we preferred to play it with the Xbox controller – that worked very well.

Above all, the story stands out in this game, because it takes place entirely in the realm of the dead – more precisely, in the realm between the living and the afterlife, where you can find eternal rest. Every person collects points over the course of their life, which then determines how quickly one finds peace – particularly good people take a train for a few hours through the intermediate world, particularly bad people have to walk for years or have to work in this intermediate world to earn their everlasting peace.

We belong to the latter: we have to work. As we are a travel planner, newly deceased people come to us first and we then plan what they can do next. We recently noticed something though: many particularly good people, despite having an impeccable CV, don’t get train tickets and instead have to travel on foot – it seems to be a mistake in the system. When a particularly good woman not only doesn’t get a train ticket, but also disappears from our office, we take action – and without spoiling too much, I can say that it wasn’t just a simple oversight that led to the massive embezzlement of the valuable tickets .

On our journey through the in-between world to find the mysterious woman and solve the mystery of the missing tickets, we get to know various characters, some of whom help us a lot in our search. In particular, a demon named Glottis doesn’t leave our side and helps us in many situations (although he admittedly maneuvers us into more than some of them). In classic point & click style, we now run through an exciting world and solve many complex but interestingly designed puzzles by improperly using various objects.

You can tell the game’s age though, and not just in the somewhat outdated graphics. The puzzles sometimes lack basic quality-of-life features that you have become so used to over the years. For example, there is no help function, nor is there a fast travel function. All in all, this is bearable, and the low-poly 3D style of the characters and objects in front of clearly two-dimensional backgrounds also has a certain charm. The sound is disproportionately louder and shriller in some places than others, but that’s not a big problem either.

Overall, the technical part made a very good impression, as you would expect from a remaster. We didn’t have any crashes or bugs, it ran smoothly throughout and we didn’t maneuver ourselves into any softlocks – very nice!

Only the puzzles could have been a little more polished in one place or another. Classic inconveniences such as objects that can hardly be distinguished from the background are a problem that, in my opinion, should no longer occur. Minor inaccuracies between the logic we learned and the one we were supposed to use in the end were annoying, but not tragic either. However, we often didn’t see certain rooms or passages due to the perspective of the fixed camera, which made life difficult for us – there was definitely room for improvement here.

All in all, it wasn’t too bad though. We had to peek into the walkthrough once or twice because we couldn’t get anywhere, but that’s acceptable. Above all, the story was very interestingly designed and very well told, so that I quickly forgot the game’s smaller quirks.

There was a lot of attention to detail, which I really like in newly created worlds. There was a lot of gallows and shallow humor, which I really enjoyed because it was always delivered very appropriately – overall I’m impressed with this game and glad to have played it! It definitely gets a recommendation from me if you haven’t played it yet.

What do you think about this game? Did you like watching or was the topic too dark for you? Will you still play it yourself? Join the discussion on Discord!