Product Description

Meet Manny Calavera, travel agent at the Department of Death. He sells luxury packages to souls on their four year journey to eternal rest. But there's trouble in paradise. Help Manny untangle himself from a conspiracy that threatens his very salvation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7306 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Lucas Arts
• Model: 10918
• ESRB Rating: Teen
• Platforms: Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 95
• Format: CD-ROM

Features

• 3-D Adventure

Amazon.com Review
Join Manny, the undead travel agent, and uncover a conspiracy to keep new additions to the underworld from buying a safe passage through purgatory. Grim Fandango combines a unique story line and complicated puzzles to create an adventure different from any you have experienced before. Follow Manny through four years of mystery on his quest for true love and eternal salvation.

The game opens to find Manny in search of the perfect client, one with the means to place them both on the fast track out of purgatory and into eternal paradise. Enter Mercedes Colomar, the client who has it all--beauty, brains, and enough money to buy them each tickets on the exclusive No. 9 train. Following the film-noir formula, Mercedes promptly vanishes, leaving Manny to solve the mystery behind her disappearance and her connection with the Department of Death.

With fantastic graphics--stylishly rendered in the film-noir style--and art from the Mayan, Aztec, and Mexican traditions, Grim Fandango is imaginative and appealing. The challenging puzzles call for attentive play and serious exploration of the Land of the Dead--not an unappealing job when surrounded by such beautiful animation. Include the original story line and humorous characters and you won't want to stop playing--we didn't!

Amazon.com Product Description
A trip into Mexico's Day of the Dead, where you experience a film noir epic adventure.

GameSpot Review
Adventure game designers face a difficult task. The genre is by its very nature linear and serves primarily to tell stories, but without puzzles, there's no game. Combining these two elements is the challenge. The story must be intricate and engaging enough to make the inclusion of puzzles seem plausible, and the puzzles must be clever enough to not jump out as an artificial roadblock for the story. It's the rare game that meets one of these goals, let alone both. But Grim Fandango, the latest from Tim Schafer of Full Throttle and Day of the Tentacle fame, achieves this delicate combination and more. In addition to being a very good adventure game, it features great writing and beautiful art direction.

Grim Fandango is based upon Mexican folklore, set in the land of the dead. You play Manny Calavera, employee of the Department of Death and travel agent to newly dead souls who are just setting out on the treacherous four-year journey to the ninth underworld. Employees of the DOD, as it is called, are souls who must work off debts from their previous lives in order to earn their own passage to the final resting place. To pay off the debts, agents must accrue a certain number of premium souls, those of the virtuous who have earned more pleasant means of passage, the ultimate of which is the Number Nine, a bullet-train that makes the journey in a more desirable four days.

But Manny is down on his luck. His clients never qualify for the premium packages. And even when he meets one that does, the saintly Mercedes Colomar, he can't seem to find a suitably saintly mode of transportation, reluctantly setting her off on foot into the dangerous world beyond. But Colomar's case will lead Manny to the discovery that all is not as it seems in the DOD, and he will set out on his own journey to set things right. The game follows four years of Manny's afterlife as he travels through a variety of fantastic locales, searching for Mercedes and the real source of corruption.

You will lead Manny through the city of El Marrow, the port town Rubacava, a mining colony at the edge of the world, and the gates of the ninth underworld itself. Each location is distinct, with its own atmosphere and interesting characters. The visual design is consistently great, drawing upon various Latin American sources, such as angular Aztec stonework and the stylized Day of the Dead skeletons, and using them to create modern buildings and vehicles such as cruise ships and casinos. The sound is equally impressive, with great voice acting, distinct sound effects, and a diverse and subtle score by Peter McConnell which ranges from mariachi to jazz.

But the writing is where Grim Fandango earns the most praise. Parodying film noir cliches has become a cliche unto itself, and Grim Fandango thankfully avoids the obvious. This isn't just a faux Sam Spade mystery. Instead, the game draws upon darker and more complex sources, with Chinatown, Casablanca, and even David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross lurking in its shadows. And there are very few jokes in the game, but it is funny. It derives its humor from its situations and characters (such as Manny's oversized sidekick, Glottis) without making fun of itself, helping to create a believable world.

The puzzles help to maintain this believability. While traditional in nature, they are worked into the storyline well. And they are varied, both in style and difficulty. For the most part, you'll have a series of known objectives to complete before moving on to the next locale. These objectives are complex, though, and often the solutions will have multiple parts. You'll undoubtedly be stumped more than once, but the solutions are logical and subtle clues are plentiful.

Grim Fandango is not a typical LucasArts adventure. It's the first from the company to dispense with traditional 2D animation and move to the more cinematic 3D style made popular with Infogrames' Alone in the Dark games, and also utilized in Origin Systems' underrated Bioforge. It uses a keyboard-driven interface instead of the traditional point-and-click, and Manny signals significant objects by turning his head and looking as he passes by. Grim Fandango overcomes the major problems with this style, so only rarely will you be frustrated by disorienting camera-angle switching or feel lost because of an obscure exit.

It would be remiss to avoid mention of Grim Fandango's minor technical faults (such as the strange behavior exhibited by almost every elevator in the game). But these are unfortunate drawbacks to an otherwise great game. The one real problem with Grim Fandango is that the end comes too soon. This isn't because it's too short (it should take most a good two- to three-dozen hours), but because the designers have created a rich world that you won't want to leave, filled with memorable characters that are hard to say goodbye to. Don't be surprised if you're sad when it's over. --Ron Dulin
--Copyright ©1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited.

Customer Reviews

Still a good game after all these years
This game is still great. The characters, the storyline, and the acting is exactly what I expected it to be coming from the days when LucasArts was GOOD. Overall, still a great game to play for those looking for an adventure game, but wants a good start.

One of the best!
My son and i played this together when he was still a boy, and it was the most involving and most fun of all the adventure games we played together.And the graphics and small slice of latino life were fabulous, too. Highly recommended for preteens and parents to play together!

Instant Classic
When I first played this game it was a demo back in 1998, and I was blown away.

I bought this game and played it on my good old Pentium 2 350 MHz and I just loved every minute of it!

I still to this day play it at least twice a year! its a shame that all of the Tim Shaffer games though are very, very, very good don't seem to sell well (Psychonauts is another great game).