Slaughtering a Sacred Cow, Revisiting ‘Grim Fandango’

I’m back to writing criticism in my weekly PopMatters’ posts, starting with an evaluation of Grim Fandango.

I’d like to take this chance to expand upon one point that I didn’t really explore properly in the piece: why Grim Fandango gained the title as “greatest adventure game of all time” in the first place. I do mention that resonance and evaluation of the game was elevated over time thanks to the all the attention and praised heaped on it by its fans. That’s how cultural esteem works. And I do believe its fans are utterly and completely earnest in their love of Grim Fandango. They believe everything they say about it. When they claim it is the “greatest adventure game of all time,” there is something to that.

Part of it is a matter of what they’re talking about when they talk about Grim Fandango. See, I’m not convinced a lot of the game’s fans ever completed it back in the day. A lot of the praise of the game, I remember reading, focuses almost exclusively on the first two years. It also feels like that is where the bulk of the testing went. The material in year three and four are more of the ‘what the hell were they thinking philosophy.’ That’s where a lot of my walkthrough look ups happened. Including one puzzle with a cigarette and a pair of stockings you’d be forgiven for thinking wasn’t a puzzle because getting a different and desired result required such exact timing. Remember this was before the internet was such a widespread thing. Walkthroughs and Let’s Plays couldn’t be found at the tap of a few keys. I could easily see, the game’s most ardent fans in the 1998 and through 1999 just not getting past Rubacava.

As such, I feel a lot of the game’s praise comes from an evaluation of the style alone. All that good stuff — the art, the characters, the dialogue, the humor, the tone, the very ethos of the game — is what sticks in people’s minds. It’s the same effect those screenshots have on people. It conveys everything the game is about and makes you to want to like the game. Even the story up to that point is original and engaging. It even lays some really great groundwork on the game’s themes. That is true Grim Fandango‘s legacy in the minds of so many players.

As for those few who did manage to finish it, their evaluation on the game is fundamentally going to be different than that of a neophyte. It’s the same issue I have with a lot of the praise given to The Secret of Monkey Island and other older adventure games. Yes, they are the best designed games of their type and their era, but they are not holistically well designed. They have puzzles and logic that causes real issues. However, they are not problems to fans of these games because they have internalized the solutions to these puzzles. They know to put the direction sign in the middle of the petrified forest to reveal a hidden passage. They know to set a fire in the break room to have demons explode a coffee mug. They know to make Glottis vomit in the garage and freeze the remains. These are blocks to the rest of us that kill pacing and kill any higher engagement with the material as we are stuck on the logistics level just to progress.

The evaluation of Grim Fandango up until now has not been a holistic one. Its reputation has been built on fragments of the game’s whole. I’m glad that the Remastered version happened, even if I did not end up as high on the game as many others. It means that the dedicated fans don’t get to have the last and only word on it.

I will admit, “Slaughtering a Sacred Cow” may have been too brash a title. I don’t really do much more than somewhat overcook the sacred cow. It’s still good, just not up to the loftier standards its reputation implies.