Grim Fandango Remastered

What is this game?

A four-year journey through over 100 exotic locales. An extraordinary experience within 3D Art Deco and Aztec-inspired environments. A web of intrigue 50 characters deep. A shocking portrait drawn wit 7,000 lines of revealing dialogue. hundreds of challenging puzzles for all adventures. a smooth, seamless interface puts you smack in Manny's world. A lush orginial score featuring Swing-era bebop and jazz.

The Remastered edition is mostly a straight port of the 1998 classic, but with some tasteful minor additions, such as a better lighting system for all those film noire shadow effects.

Did I enjoy playing it?

With the occasional peek at a walkthrough, yeah. The game is incredibly charming and the story is fun. I don't play "adventure games" a lot, but as far as I understand it, Grim Fandango was one of the last big releases before the genre had died off, and I can say the game has aged really well. It did feel like it was almost too long, but maybe that was just me being stuck on some slightly obscure puzzles. *8/10*

Playing it on Linux, or low-spec hardware?

I ran into some weird issues with GOG's Linux version of the game. Some Steam Deck users have reported the same, too. Basically, you get the error message "Unable to initialize game. Make sure the latest graphics card drivers are installed" when you launch the game through the desktop shortcut. But if you go into the game installation folder and run ./GrimFandango directly, it should be fine. Seems to be an issue with GOG's launch script and some libraries that it pulls, but I did not investigate it much.

Bug report on the GOG forums

gardenapple - 2024-02-29

Linux and low-spec-ish gaming