All the backtracking and the guesswork is made worse by all the just-longer-than-I'd-like animations: climbing, walking, and even unfolding Manny's reaper scythe all slow things down just a tad too much for my tastes. You'll walk into a room, fill Manny's infinite inner pockets with pseudo-random trash, and leave, only to return and repeat the process multiple times if you missed some important cue and need a fresh batch of expended items. It was also a time when players had a lot more patience for adventure game puzzles-or at least I did. 1998 wasn't just a time of low-fidelity graphics. Grim Fandango also suffers in retrospect thanks to nearly two decades of advancement in video game pacing.
What Remastered does is remove any jagged aliasing, and it sharpens the colors in such a way that makes the game appear more "true" to its target aesthetic. The game’s piñatas, skeletons, and the Land of the Dead's bureaucratic concrete are already flat, while the pulpier, art deco backgrounds never needed to change at all. Most games of the era suffer when upscaled to hi-res displays, but Grim Fandango was smartly (or perhaps unintentionally) future-proofed against this kind of issue. Grim Fandango was coded in an era where polygons were actually recognizable as such: characters are blocky, flat, and monochromatic, obvious even under the new shaders, retouched textures, and sharper corners of the remake. It doesn't hurt that this Day of the Dead-inspired comedy has an art style which translates well into today’s higher resolutions. Scarcity makes the heart grow fonder, in this case, and so the adventures of protagonist Manny Calavera, Meche, and Glottis through the Land of the Dead have become the perfect candidates for this new "remastered" edition. Grim Fandango’s near-mythical stature has only increased by the fact that the game has never been re-released or ported to modern hardware since its initial release. Grim Fandango was the last adventure game Schafer worked on as part of the now-defunct LucasArts, and its commercial failure represented the end of a golden age for the genre, cementing the game’s legend in certain circles.
It could just as easily be said, however, that he was one of the first to recognize adventure games' inherent usefulness as a comedy tool. Tim Schafer is often credited with being one of the funniest people in video games for good reason.
Input a puzzle, and a ready-made bit of conversation dispenses in capsule form-perfect and unaltered by the player's actions. In the days before The Walking Dead, point-and-click adventure games acted like coin operated dialogue machines. Maybe that's why adventure games seem like the perfect place to make people laugh. A great deal of comedy is about timing, and when the audience is in control of how fast things play out, comic timing can be finicky and unpredictable. Links: Official website | SteamComedy is one of the most difficult things to convey in video games.
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