Latest reviews:
|
Grim Fandango  Manufacturer: Lucas Arts In Brief: Gorgeous game, great story, really difficult puzzles
Grim Fandango is the game people point to when they say no one plays adventure games anymore Critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful, it is shown as proof that the adventure game market is very small. And it's hard to argue the point: it's a stunning game, and it bombed. But then, a game this hard was never going to win many converts.
The story by game designer Tim Schafer, who along with Chan and Dave Grossman created the amazing Day of the Tentacle, is also terrific. It is the story of Manny Calavero, a travel agent in the Mexican land of the dead, the land you see represented by those little skeletons playing guitar you buy in import shops. You arrange passage to the paradisiacal Ninth Underworld, but only those who have lived good lives can get the high-priced voyages, and your clients seem to all be morally deficient. You need a good client, but you are thwarted at every turn by the sleazy star salesman.
The dialogue is great, with consistently good voice acting. When a company employee turns out to be a spy, Manny calmly notes, "that's the last time we use that temp agency." When a newly dead soul asks if Manny wants to see her birthmark he says sure, where is it, and she says "wherever you put my skin." Everything is witty; there's a great sequence where a friend pours out her heart to you while you get an ever-changing selection of replies: "Oh?" "I had a dog once" "Yikes!" "Hedwig is an interesting name" as she drivels on. It's all great.
The puzzles here are terrific, intelligent and sensible, ones that take thought but nothing that has you banging your head against the wall. Puzzles that make you feel smart for solving them. That feeling of intelligence was not to last.
The first major flaw in the game is Glottis. The Land of the Dead, if you didn't know, is staffed by demons specially created to do manual labor; drive cars, run elevators, that sort of thing. While the dead souls are dapper, well-dressed skeletons, the demons are huge misshapen beasts with growly voices, and Glottis becomes Manny's driver. When the car is stopped, he sits there making "vroom vroom" noises and is often a loud, abrasive presence in an otherwise witty and sophisticated game. He's like the broad comic relief in a movie that doesn't need comic relief.
Eventually things go very wrong for Manny and he has to leave town, heading for Ruba Cava. Ruba Cava is the largest part of the game, a vast, beautiful town with a whole cast of characters, where you get to play out a Casablanca-ish plot. Suddenly, with the help of a truly stunning cut scene, a year has passed, and things go very, very bad for me. Because the game gets harder and harder, but I don't get smarter and smarter.
Not at first; there are always a few different puzzles you can work at, so at first I just solved those. Then I couldn't solve anything. Well, I'd done okay so far, so I thought I'd get one little hint from the uhs hints site's online hints, just one hint to get me over. But then I was stuck again and I went up and got one more hint. And then another. And then I gave up and downloaded the UHS file. Because at this point I couldn't solve much of anything.
Is it because I'm stupid? Well, partially, I think I've made it clear in previous reviews that I'm not the sharpest penny in the piggy bank. Some of them I really should have got. Some I would have got if I had a better memory and a more organized mental process, or paid more attention. But I would have had to be a lot smarter for some, and a couple were really pushing into unreasonableness. In fact, most of the puzzles were arguably fair -- they followed a logical train of thought -- it just wasn't reasonable to expect anyone to be able to solve them.
Things were even worse in year three; the first puzzle requires you to figure out how to do something that it never would have occurred to me I'd want to do! Increasingly you had these puzzles that had multiple parts -- you know, you solve it and it doesn't work but that's because you have to do something else too? But that was nothing, because the last year, the dreaded year four, was almost upon us.
At this point I cheated on pretty much everything. We were at Discworld hard, Lightbringer hard, we had gone beyond unreasonable to just plain unfair. Puzzles required me to do things I would never, ever, ever think of. And near the end is one of the puzzles where even though you can figure out in principle what's supposed to happen it's almost impossible to actually make it happen.
The inventory system, by the way, is terrible. It's an awkward system where you can only look at things one at a time, and is a total bitch. I can't imagine why they thought it was a good idea.
But throughout, there are beautiful graphics, witty dialogue and a great story: It's an adventure game I liked more in spite of the puzzles than because of them. This game is such a work of art that no matter how annoyed I got at it, and no matter how many of the puzzles I found aggravating, I just can't hate it.
But I can't quite love it either. Demo Review:The demo's readme file doesn't say this, but you need a 3D graphics card for this game to look right. I played it without a proper card, and the whole thing looked like I was watching it through infrared goggles. But it was a pretty good demo, with interesting, solvable puzzles. When I got a 3D card I played a little of the demo to see what it looked like, and it looks pretty cool, with its Mexican Day of the Dead theme. It's a fun demo, and at some point I'll definitely get the game. -- Charles Herold -2000 Glitches:No bugs! None! In a game this size! Nothing even resembling a bug! I'm shocked!
Related Links:
|
Find Software: