(Ed: This is post is not by Gareth Newnham but a good friend of the Lemming – Lance French)
Oh dear. This is going to be a difficult one. You see, anyone that’s actually excited about Grim Fandango: Re-mastered is very likely to be a fan of the 90’s classic, and for good reason. It’s one of those games which is legendarily hard to criticise. The storyline, setting, gameplay and soundtrack are damn near perfect, and I get goosebumps just thinking about them. It was genuinely witty, engaging and involving in a way that few games before or since have been able to pull off. If there is a Heaven, and it has a games collection, then Grim Fandango is certainly there. But the discs are never in the box because someone is ALWAYS playing it.
Which brings me to the ‘difficult’ part. A lot of people reading this will likely have already bought the game, either on the morning of release or via pre-order (in which case there is fuck all this reviewer can do other than chide them for pre-ordering anything in a system without the scarcity of hard copies), or are seeking the slim justification needed to run off and buy it as soon as possible (in which case, you’re unlikely to listen to me, anyway). So, for the sake of everyone else, rather than keep my overall thoughts for the end of the review where they belong, I should probably make my opinions clear right here and now. Probably in some large and gaudily-coloured block capitals, and spend the rest of my time painstakingly explaining myself.
So here goes:
I AM SO FUCKING GLAD I PLAYED THE ORIGINAL RELEASE OF GRIM FANDANGO IN THE 90’s.
And that’s it, in a nutshell. Every moment I spent playing Grim Fandango: Re-mastered was a moment that I longed to be playing the original game instead. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some sentimental old prick who wets his rose-tinted glasses with tears of nostalgia over the thought of the good old days. The re-mastered editions of the Monkey Island series instantly trumped the old ones in every conceivable way, and I can’t think of any reason that I’ll bother with the originals ever again. But in that case, it wasn’t just a testament to how good the original games were, but how skilfully the special editions updated the classics. Grim Fandango was not going to be subject to quite as much of an overhaul, sure, but I was shocked to see just how much of a lazy job had been done.
GASP! at the new lighting effects that you’ll notice maybe once or twice!
The basics of Grim Fandango need little explanation. You play the role of Manny Calavera, one of a number of Grim Reapers working for the Department of Death in a beautifully-crazed mash-up of Mesoamerican folklore and film noir styles. The gameplay is just about the zenith of the LucasArts adventure game design of the time. The puzzles are logical without being obvious, the characters are likeable, memorable and well-realised, and the whole thing just pulls itself together so solidly that it’s near impossible to find a criticism. If it weren’t for the dodgy-as-fuck Resident Evil-a-like ‘tank’ controls, it’d be the perfect game.
On the plus side, the re-mastered edition has sorted out the lacklustre control system, hiring on one of the many modders of the original game to splice in a more intuitive point-and-click interface with camera-relative movement. It doesn’t always work wonders. Many a time you’ll find yourself moving in the opposite direction than desired due to a camera switch, but it’s certainly better than it used to be. Vehicle controls are also a lot less annoying, and the whole affair is now smoother and slicker to play. For those who love to hurt themselves needlessly, the tank controls are still an option.
However, that’s about the point where the benefits of playing Grim Fandango: Re-mastered version over the original end, and the rest of the ‘improvements’ wind up being annoying and unnecessary at best. At worst, they manage to do the impossible, and decrease enjoyment of a once-classic title. The first clue to the shoddy nature of Grim Fandango: Re-mastered is the lack of an autosave. It’s not much in itself, but it’s certainly indicative of the degree to which Double Fine phoned this one in. It wouldn’t have killed them to include an autosave feature, but instead of opting not to and saying no more about it, a text box at the start of the game informs the player than there isn’t one, and that you’ll have to go into the menu and save manually like some kind of peasant. The inclusion of autosave would have worked great on console players (who I can only assume are the focus audience, not able to play the original at all) and been a nice little feature for PC audience, so to mention so boldly that it doesn’t have one at all is baffling, even absurd.
MARVEL! at the limited re-touching of the still-woefully-angular character models!
If your main reason for getting the re-mastered edition of the game is for the much-vaunted graphical improvements, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. The graphical upgrades aren’t just lazy, they’re downright negligent, and it’s a crying shame to see such little work done on a game that was presented so beautifully over 15 years ago. The pre-rendered backgrounds have apparently been ‘upscaled’, but that makes little overall difference, and the character models, though now hi-res and a lot less jagged, still bear the unmistakable marks of age. They’re still awkward, angular late 90’s polygons, but now they’re slightly more colourful awkward, angular late 90’s polygons. The game has a very stark and bold style, which means very few textures to have to deal with. The real crime is that the new colourful models don’t gel at all with the backdrops, and Glottis especially looks like a character from Octonauts. Corners are cut so hard in Grim Fandango: Re-mastered that some models, such as Manny’s boss, Don Copal is only re-touched from the neck up, and if you were excited to see some of those amazing cutscenes with those glorious 2015 graphical improvements, think again; they’re the same old, same old. The only things that look in any way different are the characters and the items. It really was the very least they could have done.
In fact, most every ‘improvement’ they made to the game (apart from the aforementioned controls) seems to take it further and further away from the quality product it once was. The game still lacks an ‘always-on run’ option, which means that PC players will still have to hold down shift as well as an arrow key, or suffer the 5 minutes it might take to cross an empty screen, but special care has been taken to add achievements to the game, out-of-place accolades for…talking to certain characters. Many of the achievements are given not for doing actual neat things in the game’s engine, but for eliciting a certain line of dialogue from each character, which is not exactly difficult to do, and the achievements in the game are named for the lines of dialogue themselves. It was not only confusing but infuriating to see these non-rewards pop up for no real reason other than to tick boxes. Modern games have achievements, Grim Fandango: Re-mastered is a modern game, ergo these pointless additions must be made. No time is wasted in bothering to integrate them, and boy does it show.
The soundtrack has been updated, re-recorded by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, who performed the Broken Age soundtrack, and it fits just as masterfully as the original did, though there are some points where their talents feel wasted on what is, essentially, background music. These audio improvements are certainly nothing to be sniffed at, however, and the music in the game has been given a new lease of life. Sitting and listening to the Bone Wagon music is still a very pleasant experience. Commentary tracks have been added, in case you’re one of the four people on Earth that like listening to them, and at the touch of a ‘Z’, you can hear all about the developers’ woes, and how the producer really wanted to cut bits of the game out. They’d be a harmless addition, too, if they didn’t manage to bug their way into character conversations, the commentary track starting up halfway through in-game dialogue in embarrassing fashion.
CRINGE! as the team talks about bits they kind of wanted to cut out!
The game’s lighting and shadow effects have apparently been overhauled, and much is made of them, but honestly, you’ll only really notice it once, at the beginning, in Manny’s office. For every improvement they’ve made, there’s also an ‘issue’ that managed to slip by, and many of them show just how little effort has been put into (at least the PC version of) the re-master. Problems I had with the new-and-improved rendering system aside (perhaps it hates AMD graphics as much as everything else seems to), there are a host of tiny annoyances that detract from enjoyment of the game. I’ve taken the liberty of including a couple of examples of the out-of-place text and pointer issues at the end of the review. What’s not so visible are the crashing issues, and the stuttering during the cut-scenes which had me reaching for my old copy of the game. As is the case with PC games, your mileage WILL vary, and they’ll probably fix all of this soon enough, but it was a harsh reminder of the sloppy job they’ve hammered together.
So in summation (again):
I AM SO FUCKING GLAD THAT I PLAYED THE ORIGINAL RELEASE OF GRIM FANDANGO IN THE 90’s.
Back then, it was an instant classic, a deep and intuitive point-and-click that did what point-and-click games did best. It presented a brilliant story and setting, combined with intuitive and fiendish puzzles and situations with a hefty dash of dry humour. And it still does that, if you look past all the flaws and bugs and pointless ‘improvements’. It’s a classic case of trying to ‘fix what ain’t broken’.
So, is it worth buying? Fuck no. Not even for a tenner. Your best bet is to get on eBay, and get yourself a copy of the original. There’s a neat launcher available to help it run on modern machines, and the controls mod is easy enough to install. Because this is less a re-master, and more an unfortunate, po-faced cash-in. It’s like trying to ‘improve’ Michelangelo’s David by adding a pair of shutter shades and a #YOLO necklace.
