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: #4492 in 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

Problems with Vista/XP, but still a blast!
Don't get me wrong, this game is great - brought me right back to obsessively playing the Gabriel Knight games, the Neverhood, and the Dig (also by LucasArts and amazing). It's great to look at, fun to play, and has one of the better story lines of any game I've ever played.

Now, for the unfortunate downside: there is a lot of stuff you have to do to run this with Vista or XP (or if your computer runs faster than they did back in 95/98. There are two patches you have to download (pretty quick and easy to find) BEFORE you attempt to install the game - in fact, one of the patches is a replacement installer. The game WILL NOT WORK AT ALL without the two patches. Once this is going, you have to run the game from the GRIM menu in the LucasArts folder in Windows 95/98 compatibility mode and run it as administrator.
With everything in its place, the game works perfectly until the chapter called Year 3, in which it repeatedly locks up. This can be fixed by switching discs and playing through for a while (although you lose the characters' ability to talk and get "closed captioning" for a bit) - then save the game, swap discs again, and you're back to where you need to be.
It's a bit of a hassle figuring all this out as you go (had to uninstall and reinstall about 90 times and then figure out the disc swapping by trial and error). I heard in my net searches on the problems that LucasArts is planning on re-issuing its classic adventures (this one included) in Vista format - if I knew this to be an absolute fact, I would advise waiting on this to happen.

However, the game is still enjoyable and is definitely one of the best and most original ideas out there. Hopefully, this review keeps you from pulling out the amount of hair I went through - it is well worth the extra trouble beforehand to play this game!

After 10 years, still ranks as my favorite.
I still remember the first time I played Grim Fandango. I was 17 years old at the time (was 16 when I played the Demo). What I remember more however is when I ended the game. I remember the strangest feeling I ever had upon ending a game... actual sadness. It might sound pathetic, but this is something that most of those who played Grim Fandango felt as well (if you don't believe me check the Gamespot hall of fame entry on Grim Fandango). This is a beautiful game really. The only beautiful game I have ever played. Every aspect of it shines with wit. From the art deco graphics to the Aztec inspired bebop sound track to the amazingly written script, this game stands unique and in a class of its own. The fact that it is still selling here after 10 years at almost double the price at which I bought it in 1998 is a testament to how adored it is by gamers everywhere. This is the climax of the Lucasarts school of adventure gaming and unfortunately, the last statement of a genre that is dearly missed. I recommend playing this game very highly. I almost envy you if you have never played it. There is nothing really quite like playing it for the first time around. Enjoy!

Another Nostalgic 90's Game Greatly Remembered And Loved
I still remember when I first bought this game in the 90's and I still play
the game from time to time for both entertainment and nostalgia. As with most of the pc games in the 90's there was no type commands but just the point and click with the mouse usually but still the humor and video cut scenes in the game were more than enough to keep you playing until the end. The short story-plot was your character was a civil servant for the spiritual plane where the recently departed had to stop before making their final passage to eternal rest. Your character for whatever reason had to work off a certain amount of time to clear his debt before going to the place of eternal rest as well. The job was you worked to see how well the person who just died was in life meaning the more compassionate, and humane they were in life the faster to paradise they would get to meaning the usual ways to get to paradise depending on the person was bus, boat, car, and if very high on the morality meter the number nine train which would only take nine minutes for the person to get to paradise. Of course there was more to the game and that is why it made it very entertaining to play. The video graphics are of the 90's era so again if your used to playing recent pc games you might feel the graphics are sub par but don't let that dissuade you from this game. The voice actors they got to do the characters were incredible both in their acting for their characters and their ability to bring the humor and excitement into the game itself. I know while some think this doesn't have the fighting or the action of recent pc games but I still feel that it's one of the few classics that many people will still find very enjoyable to play both for themselves and children without worrying about to much violence of the game.