Resurrection | Grim Fandango

Format: PC | Genre: Adventure | Publisher: Lucas Arts | Developer: Lucas Arts | Released: 1998
Why now? It’s not dead yet…

By Christos Reid

Do you ever think about death? It’s often easy to start thinking about the ramifications of your mortality when it’s three in the morning and you’re lying in bed, post-gaming session. But how do we make games come to life in the Land of the Dead?

When I first saw Grim Fandango, I knew instantly it was the one game I wished I’d designed myself. The art style, the narrative, even the light jazz sounding off in the dark Rubacavan night – all were perfectly placed and thought-out, and couldn’t have captured the game’s vision more. Grim Fandango challenged the idea of the point-and-click adventure, twisting Monkey Island’s oft-humorous quips into dark, cynical commentaries on the players’ actions, as they desperately attempt to solve the puzzles they stumble across as they cross the Underworld in search of a woman, and themselves.

//A four-year hero
Manny Calavera, the game’s protagonist, takes his name from a variety of sources, his surname being Spanish for “skull.” Why mess around? Mario was originally called JumpMan, and by God it should’ve stayed that way. Manny is a dead human being, and his name is a Spanish rendition of “male skull.” This WYSIWYG approach to simply naming a character seemed – and still seems – so much less pretentious than the long, spindly names of the inhabitants of Monkey Island.

The game spends a lot of the opening sequences trying to teach you as much as possible about the world you inhabit, as even the back of the box indicates that you’ll be staying there for four years, so you may as well be comfortable. This is no “hell” level, no cyber-demons to kill; this is the habitat for those who have crossed over, and like any human habitat, there must be a key industry. This time, the key industry is death. Manny works at the Department of Death, as something of a travel agent, offering various afterlife packages to people dependent on the life they led in the land of the still-breathing. Gold tickets allow you to sit on a train for four minutes, offered to nuns, and other such nice, pleasant people. Act like a bastard, and it’s a four-year trek across a dangerous vista of monsters and dark forests, without a guaranteed success.

For Manny, the choice isn’t so simple. His life above ground was exceptionally badly-led, and as a result he’s stuck working off the moral debt he created for himself, post excessum. Stuck with him is Glottis, a colossal demon born to drive, but never allowed to due to his size, simply wasting away his days as the department’s mechanic. Two misfits, with one purpose: to rebel against a system they feel is unfair. With a cannibalised car, a demon driver and a mind for stealing a client who’ll finally get Manny the commission he needs to cross over, they tear off into the land of the living.

Your glimpses of the Land of the Living are horrifying at first. All the living beings are gross, two-dimensional parodies of human musculature. This could easily be seen as symbolic, that we only truly become ourselves once the fear and obstacle of death is removed. Yet Manny remains determined in his desire to cross over. What lies past the gates? Oblivion? Heaven? It’s never clear, but Tim Schafer managed to create a likeable, but spiritually suicidal character, a prospect both terrifying and engaging.

There’s a debate over Tim Schafer’s games and their engaging gameplay – that is to say, whether or not it exists. Allow me to contend the former, with Grim Fandango as my vehicle of self-righteous Tim propaganda. Grim Fandango’s puzzles were never the “use the pipe on the honey to open the door, then use the screw on the potato to start the car” level of ridiculous luck and guesswork that became the off-putting staple-mark of point-and-click adventure titles. There’s a pneumatic tube in your offices, used to send encapsulated missives to the travel agents, or more specifically, the really good clients to the guy next door, Domino. How to intercept one? You have a pack of cards, and a tube that requires air to rush through for it to chuck capsules down its length. Card in tube, new client. Of course, we are cynical, and we suspect Domino is corrupt as he gets all the good clients and we get none, though we share the same job title.

Did I say we? This is the incredible thing about Manny; his constant verbal critique of the world around him is what makes him such an easy character to become. “Don’t have that kind of equipment,” he laments as you attempt to have him pick up the Moon, and you begin to wonder if he’s either joined a secretive cult of hyper-sarcasm, or if he’s truly breaking the fourth wall with Tim Schafer as his sledgehammer. He’s a developed character in his own right, much as Guybrush was, and through his critique of the world around him he’ll often lead you to the next link in the chain of puzzles.

//Death and tourists
The world itself was something of beauty. 1930s art deco sat comfortably next to Mayan architecture, combining the two themes into something that was both stylish and mythological. Of course, the thirties was a fantastic era for film noir and classic crime narrative, so of course, everybody smokes. But for once this isn’t a problem, because everybody’s dead. Today’s characters tend not to suck down cancerous smoke if they can avoid it, but through using characters who couldn’t suffer from the smoke they inhaled (with what lungs, I’m not so sure), it suddenly became stylish again.

Manny’s journey takes him through various locales, though you’ll eventually notice the pattern of events as each of the years he spends in the underworld comes to a close. The camera slowly slinks back out of a window, with Manny mopping the floor of wherever he’s ended up, followed by a “one year later” title, and a zoom back into a completely transformed environment with him at the head of it, smoking and gazing over his success. For all his failures as a travel agent, he’s a damned successful businessman, capable of turning around everything from a diner to a cargo ship.

As a result of this, no area stays foreign for long, and you’re never left feeling like a fish out of water. It’s surprising, in theory, that you’re able to discern character from character, their stylised facial features simply black lines and circles on a three-dimensional ellipse. But through the addition or removal of some of these lines, and slight discolouration added (we know the lead antagonist is evil because he’s the only yellowed set of bones in the game, making him an effortlessly defined outsider), infinite characters can be created, and we can tell Manny from Domino - though the latter’s eponymous markings may help somewhat.

Sometimes I would play for hours, delving into the game and racking up my phone bill by calling a friend and trying to explain a puzzle that had stumped me, only for the answer to emerge while I slowly talked it out. Sometimes I would play simply for the cut-scenes, or to see whether, years later, I could still remember how to solve everything. Most of the time I couldn’t, but that was what made the game so magical. Adventure titles have puzzles that will literally bring forth tears of frustration, but to see Manny’s pleasure written in both his dialogue and across his face when you solve it, together, is a reward that completing Gears of War 2 on Insane difficulty will never provide.

Of all the tools for puzzle solving, there is one that has become the striking emblem of the Land of the Dead, both in Grim Fandango and popular culture: the reaper’s scythe. Manny’s scythe unfolds, much like a mic stand or a camera’s tripod, and all at once you have the solution to both how the Grim Reaper fits that colossal farming tool in his cloak, and how such an ancient weapon could be brought into an environment that is, aesthetically at least, sitting in the twentieth century. Its uses are far and wide, from hovering it over cat litter to find a metal detector, to jamming a door shut – but never for taking lives. Only once do you see Manny do his job, and even then the item remains purely ceremonial. It lends something of a corporate image to Death, and thus allows us to swallow the story of corruption and betrayal for the sake of money even more easily.

Betrayal tends to come in the form of “sprouting” in Grim Fandango. In a game where bullets are going to be about as much use as a chocolate kettle, bullets that allow flowers to grow on the skeleton of a character, “laying them to rest” as it were, are lethal - and the game is full of emotionally charged scenes with those who have been sprouted. But how to maintain the impact of death in a land where the obstacle of mortality has been removed? Simple. Shoot it like the death scene from Chinatown, complete with melodramatic “it’s my time to go” dialogue and a well-crafted soundtrack, and you have your death scene. Death doesn’t have to be fatal in games, but if it isn’t, it at least has to be moving.

However, to move a player, what better way than through subtle use of music? Music is absolutely everywhere in Grim Fandango¸ whether diegetic or otherwise; and it fits the mood, never distracting, simply emphasising what’s taking place on screen. From the Mexican mariachi tones of “Companeros” (comrades), played at the Day of the Dead festival (conveniently the one day per year you experience in the game), to the swanky thirties big band jazz warbles of “Casino Calavera,” the music is always enthralling. So many modern games seem to rely on either scores lifted from their companion films, the EA catalogue of licensed music, or simply maddening techno. It’s a shame games composers often lack the hindsight to see the reason why this game’s soundtrack sells without fail for around a hundred dollars every time it shows up on eBay. In the day of Nobuo Uematsu and a few others, I pine for the days of Fandango and its atmospheric ear-heroin.

//Manny, we miss you
To understand Grim Fandango requires little, save for the puzzles that may prove to be something of a challenge. However, to understand its message, the meaning behind a game that proved to be one of Schafer’s biggest labours of love, you simply have to listen to one of Manny’s last lines. As he sits on the train that will finally take him into his destiny, hand in hand with the love of his afterlife, he muses on his experiences. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned,” he says, “it’s this: nobody knows what’s going to happen at the end of the line, so you might as well enjoy the trip.”

What a trip it was.