GRIM FANDANGO

Death is a slave to the city in LucasArts' last great adventure. 

- Ian Evenden

NEED TO KNOW

RELEASE 1998/2015

DEVELOPER LucasArts

PUBLISHER LucasArts

LINK grimremastered.com

Beyond death, in Tim Schafer’s world at least, there is only bureaucracy. Supernatural mythologies often reflect the human experience, and the afterlife —or at least, one of the afterlives— being a corporate hellscape filled with message tubes, secretaries and filing cabinets that you can never leave until your debt is paid off seems to be trying awfully hard to make a point about our existence. Office drudgery never ends, the ones at the top are the only ones to prosper, and yes I am writing this as my last job just before a trip to Disneyland. Why do you ask?

However, this is hardly the only game to delight in the tedious. The first act of Return to Monkey Island involves finding a mop so you can become the lowest of the low on a pirate ship, while being an overworked bartender is something that dates back to gaming’s earliest days. In Grim Fandango the feelings of despair and hopelessness experienced by Manny Calavera are not those of a damned soul but of one in purgatory, as he is hoping to work off his ‘debt’ through good deeds and enter a heavenly afterlife. If it exists, of course. Manny is not above existentialist pondering on whether the Land of Eternal Rest is even real, and whether all we have is the here and now.