This game was one of my favorites. And many years ago I was pleased to learn that the lobby in the game was inspired by my Dentist's office (450 Sutter St in San Francisco).<p><a href="https://www.doublefine.com/news/450-sutter" rel="nofollow">https://www.doublefine.com/news/450-sutter</a>
For a bit more historical context, see the 2008 blog post that originally accompanied this PDF: <a href="http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2008/11/grim-fandango-puzzle-design-do/" rel="nofollow">http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2008/11/grim-fandango-puzzle-desig...</a>
I loved the first and last page...<p>[first]
"This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read." -Winston Churchill<p>[last]
"To protect this document, please restrict your fallen tears of joy to this box. Thank you!"
Perhaps my favorite game of all time. I liked all of the Lucasarts adventure games, but this one was special to me. Completed it 3 times since it came out. I think it is something about the characters, the story, the world and the ambience in it.<p>I wonder how this document was used? Did they write all of it before implementing the game? Or was it written in parallel to making the game, as a reference?
A fantastic game in terms of atmosphere, artwork, characters and story but I found the puzzles to be too difficult and/or illogical and gave up pretty early into the plot.<p>Overall I remember being somewhat disappointed because of my struggle to make progress. Maybe my expectations had been too high - I was a recent convert to point n' click at the time and of course LucasArts being masters of the genre, meant my anticipation had reached fever pitch.
It is interesting to look back on the genre given that, as far as I know, it either died sometime in the 90s or grew into something unrecognisable.<p>I suspect there is a hint in the name of the document. I can't tell how these "puzzles" are meant to be puzzles and to this day I never figured out how people were meant to solve them in the context of the game. The Discworld series as I recall were terrible for this, but these puzzle structure diagrams just don't make sense to me. What is the player being challenged to do? Grim Fandango is trying to tell a story but it won't reveal what the story is until after the player has already figured it out through telepathy and brute force clicking.<p>For all these games were landmarks it was an era where it wasn't obvious what a computer game could or should do to be interesting and entertaining. Something like <i>Return of the Obra Dinn</i> captures the intent of these games (storytelling through close inspection) much more cleanly.
This<p><pre><code> It shone, pale as bone
As I stood there alone
And I thought to myself how the moon,
That night, cast its light
On my heart's true delight,
And the reef where her body was strewn.</code></pre>
Off sick from work - quite by coincidence I decided to start playing the remastered version after hearing many good things and people saying it was the best thing they've ever played etc etc.<p>I must say, it has not really grabbed me.<p>It sadly suffers from the common problem of these sort of games where you have to combine seemingly random items to make any progress. There are so far very few actual "puzzles" that you can solve, but instead mainly you just need to brute force the combinations of items to find that One Weird Combination that does something - most recent example: use a piece of coral on a rope so you can then climb the rope... wtf?! This is made even worse by the <i>sheer tedium</i> of having to walk backwards and forwards across the screens and trying everything on everything. Please game designers if you are forcing me to walk around aimlessly please at least make it quick to move around!