Cruise Elroy

For more from the Vintage Game Club on Grim Fandango‘s third chapter, see the forum thread.

In my first post on Grim Fandango, I was concerned about becoming overly reliant on walkthroughs. Now that worry has come to pass.

True, I did solve a couple of puzzles on my own, and there were a few more that I don’t feel like I “solved” but that I got past through brute force. Still, I hit GameFAQs for well over half of them. At one point I debated changing the game out of full-screen mode just to move things along faster.

What went wrong? It wasn’t that the puzzles were fiendishly difficult (although some were — especially the first one). I was just turned off by their seeming randomness. As with the Petrified Forest in Year 1, I got annoyed when I felt like I was solving puzzles just for the sake of it.

Year 2 was the high point of the game so far because the puzzles were integrated with the rest of the game. They revealed something about the characters, drove the plot forward, and made sense in context of the setting. In Year 3, the puzzles often felt largely arbitrary. What’s the deal with that giant crane that I had to swing around? Why is there a massive underwater conveyor belt? They’re obstacles without any real context. Even when I solve those kinds of puzzles on my own, I don’t get a sense of accomplishment; I just want them out of the way so the story can continue.

I’ve posited the idea that Grim Fandango is an adventure game for adventure gamers, and I think that could explain my annoyance. Fans of the genre may enjoy the gameplay and are probably less fastidious about how it’s integrated with everything else — they don’t want to let a story get in the way of a good game. As someone who loves the game’s world and could take or leave the adventure genre, I’m just the opposite — arbitrary puzzles are frustrating breaches of immersion.

Speaking of story, I found the third chapter to be weakest so far in that regard as well. The new group of characters didn’t really grab me — not even Meche, who’s ostensibly an important one — and there was a noticeable lull in plot development outside of the final cutscenes. (That sounds familiar, eh?)

In the forum, Michael suggested that this might be endemic to fiction in general:

I’ve often noticed in storytelling (games, plays, films, etc.) that the penultimate segment of the story is often the weakest. I think this is because the writers are trying very hard to set up the ending, and sometimes this means manipulating things, or coasting a bit, before the big finish.

Often, it’s the second chapter (after all the exposition is established), and the final chapter (where events come to a climax and things are resolved) that stand out in narratives. I think Grim Fandango may follow that pattern…though I have yet to reach Year 4.

One thing I do like is the environmental parallel between chapters. Each has an upstairs office that serves as a home base (the Department of Death, the Calavera Cafe, Domino’s operation), a sympathetic female character doing secretarial/administrative work who manages MacGuffins (Eva, Lupe, Meche), and an elevator/staircase down to a town/area (El Marrow, Rubacava, the Edge of the World) where the lion’s share of the puzzles are found.

Those parallels dovetail nicely with the way Manny reinvents himself during the “One Year Later” interludes. The elision is a clever way to give him a new set of acquaintances to interact with each chapter. That the characters know each other better than the player knows them strengthens the game’s mysterious pseudo-noir underpinnings.

The downside of the elisions, of course, is that there are now a ton of great characters and loose plot threads with only one chapter left to tie everything together. I look forward to seeing how (and if) the game pulls that off.