Cruise Elroy

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

Gameplay-wise, Year 4 of Grim Fandango was more of the same: increasingly half-hearted attempts at puzzle-solving supplemented with judicious use of walkthroughs. Again there were some puzzles that made me feel smart and others that irritated me. (Naturally, the puzzles didn’t make me feel dumb, because a puzzle that’s too difficult is a fault with the game!)

The grinder was particularly frustrating because, if I’m remembering correctly, it’s the only point in the game where the “use” command is not interchangeable with “pick up.” After visiting GameFAQs I was pretty annoyed that I had missed the solution because of a simple control oversight — and in the last chapter, no less! I suppose I’m at least partially to blame for that, but it did seem like a questionable design decision.

All told, my final assessment of the gameplay is similar to Michael “brainygamer” Abbott’s:

Mechanically, GF is a brutal game in many ways, and I felt the air come out of the “GF happy balloon” more times than I would have liked. I often found myself fighting the game, rather than playing it, and when the game isn’t working on all cylinders (for me, Year 3), this can become a real grind. I confess that I had to push myself through this, and I wonder if I would have finished had I not committed to doing so for the VGC. I’m glad I did, but it was touch and go for awhile.

Regarding narrative: though it never completely unraveled, the plot really started to show its seams in Year 4 — especially regarding the antagonists. While Hector LeMans is ostensibly the big bad guy, he’s just not as interesting a character as Domino Hurley. There’s simply no history between Hector and Manny, and since he’s little more than a stock criminal there’s no compelling reason for us to dislike him. I would argue that the real climax of the story is Domino’s defeat in Year 3, and that the subsequent denouement is obviated by the inexorable march towards a happy ending. Our ability to see the writing on the wall blunts the emotional impact of Year 4’s setbacks (Olivia’s betrayal, Salvador’s suicide attack, Hector’s attempted assassination).

I think the game’s writers realized this problem too, because once Domino is gone they resolve loose ends and fly towards the ending at at breakneck speed. We return to Rubacava and El Marrow, but only for very specific reasons; we don’t get free reign of the cities, and the puzzles carry a sense of urgency. We revisit a few of the minor characters, but ignore many of them; personally I could care less about Chepito, but I would have liked to know Eva’s fate. And the transition from the oddly rushed final cutscene to the credit roll is so abrupt that it literally cuts off the background music track. My sense is that the writers couldn’t decide if Year 4 was to be an epilogue or a full-blown chapter, and split the difference; the result more than a little jarring. On the whole, though, Year 4 maintained the game’s high-caliber writing.

Bottom line: Grim Fandango is worth playing — or “experiencing,” if you like — for anyone interested in the potential of the video game medium. I don’t have broad experience with adventure titles so I can’t speak to its relative gameplay quality, but I will say that its narrative elements set a standard that few games meet, even a decade later. For that, it deserves our praise.