Grim Fandango Puzzle Document (1996) [pdf]
gameshelf.jmac.org
gameshelf.jmac.org
Even though I didn't understand most references and sarcasm, few games have grabbed my attention as Grim Fandango did. The art work, the music, the writing. The whole game oozes of style that I've never seen replicated.
Even some 20+ years later I can almost recite most of Act I from heart. If you haven't played this game and like adventure games, this is one of the best.
Thank you for linking OP, this made my morning.
I still remember the feeling of the ending, and the end credits music when the violin kicked in as it played the Manny & Meche theme! The music is at least as good as this game.
So if anyone is wondering if this is just nostalgia, or if the game actually holds up, it's the latter. Just play it.
I agree that I hated the 3d though. This was a bad patch for games when everyone wanted to go 3d for the sake of it, even though it looked and played worse.
Thing is I bet the people who played it are right too, I just never managed to bring myself to play more than a few hours of the game before getting frustrated. Bad controls + 90s point-and-click-puzzle-design + early 3d graphics is not a good recipe.
Full Throttle was criticized for its dumbed-down point-and-click (basic only 3 actions + using items, instead of the usual verbs), but that was the sweetspot for my early-teens mind. Can never get enough funny responses of using the lick action.
They would put up with crazy puzzles, huge grinds, weird RPG numbers systems (AD&D in BG1/2 for example), but if you want to do action A on thing B that can not, under any circumstance feel bad to do.
It remains an interesting reflection point in the history of 3D games. It's also why the Grim Fandango remaster turned out so well, now that controls have settled into their modern forms.
Somehow I remember those parts more than the fun parts, maybe because I didn't have access to a guide back then.
Mostly, what I remember is the outstanding voice acting, and the most memorable intro ever.
Yeah, whenever I think of Maureen I think of two things: asphalt, and trouble...
(As I recall even GrimE had a similar or the same combo key. A lot of the complaints about Monkey Combat in EMI I didn't have because after a couple attempts I recall just pushing the win button and moving on.)
For similar feels, check out Disco Elysium
Planescape Torment
and almost anything by Amanita Design
Tim Schafer is really good at this. Psychonauts has a large cast of deformed-looking characters, but you'll love them all by the end.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIhLvue17Sd70y34zh2erWWpM...
They are currently doing a company wide gamejam/game idea incubation thing, after surviving Microsoft undoing the acquisition and the same Documentary crew is doing a doc about that (they did a kickstarter campaign to fund it)
> To protect this document, please restrict your fallen tears of joy to this box. Thank you! → [__]
All over the document, you can see Tim Schafer "wasted his time" by adding personality (jokes, graphics, asides) to what is basically an internal document.
I think in 2026 a document lovingly crafted like this would be deemed a great waste of time, lack of efficiency and an affront to shareholder value.
They aren't native English speakers and the story in Grim Fandango is considerably harder to follow compared to DoTT, so they lost interest a bit after we completed year 1. But as soon as their English skills improve, we'll get back to it, it's one of my favorite adventure games!
EDIT: I checked, and I was mistaken: DOTT was never dubbed in French, but Grim Fandango (and its remaster) is.
I had decided this morning that I'll try Monkey Island before Grim Fandango, because of the added complexity of Grim, as you say.
> We didn’t have the last puzzle designed when I wrote that document, so I wrote two nonsense paragraphs and then overlapped them in the file so it would look like the final puzzle description was in there, but obscured by a print formatting error. That way I could turn the document in by the deadline.
Manny doubles back to the car, reaches into Olivia's pile of flowers and finds his gun, the one he'd left there. Something really does go down like in Heat, and he's dead. All right then… I don't hate it. No matter. Ouch!
Manny doubles back to the car, reaches into Olivia's pile of flowers and finds his gun, the… Maybe the really cool thing that happens is you see his shadow traveling through time, and that's how you know he's coming back. And although I'm pretty cool with it… Great ending, ta da.
Interesting that that's not actually the case.
Monkey Island comes second of course.
Its not that I don't like it as a game, but it's just so chock full of character.
The premise alone is so compelling; in the Land of the Dead, even dead men chase money. Even with the literal afterlife a train ticket away, you have conmen and good guys living (or dying?) like there's no end of the line.
Love it. One of those rare pieces of art that continues to live in my head rent-free.
On the other hand, I still think Disney should make a Monkey Island TV show or movie. They could use Sea of Thieves-style water effects in the Volume for useful shenanigans.
I've finished it with a walkthrough so I've seen the entire game. Between an art style that didn't age well and didn't grab me even then, obscure puzzles and a theme that doesn't interest me so much, I think it is one of LucasArts worst adventure games. But that's me. Let's call it "polarizing".
- Nothing like it in style and execution.
- Superb and unique universe. It's brilliant. Fight me. ;)
- Charming, engaging storytelling full of wit and humor. Charm and humor are particularly hard to pull off, it seems, given how few games I can think of that have them. (Bard's Tale and... uh...)
- If you like the adventure games of the era, then this one is right up your alley. The puzzles are much more frustration-friendly than modern games, so they're not for the coddled gamers of today who, frankly, would just use an answer sheet when they got stuck. OTOH forcing yourself to stick with it and get that "Ohhhhhh the *diamond* makes the boat sink around us! *that's* how we climb out!" -- which is a real example from a *different* LucasArts game -- is very satisfying.If the Day of the Dead setting does nothing for you, then you'll dislike the game. But if it intrigues you, you'll likely love it.
The puzzles are arbitrary, it's not really what the game is about.
Everything's subjective, but I think most people would say that the art style was great then and is still great, and the theme is pretty unique and compelling. That's why people like it so much.
The puzzles and interface really are awful though, and I say that as someone with a reasonable tolerance for adventure game logic. It's far-and-away the worst-playing classic LucasArts adventure, and even though I'm sure there's plenty of adventure games with worse puzzle design, I'm struggling to think of one with a wider gap in quality between the game design and everything else. Everything's frequently so disjointed and it's such a slog to get around, it's not even one of those "use a walkthrough when you get stuck" games; it's a "just follow a walkthrough constantly" game, or maybe even a "just watch a longplay" game.
Too bad the dated puzzles pull me out of it so much.
GDC Talk: "One Page Designs", by Stone Librande
That GDC talk just showed up on my YouTube frontpage this morning and I watched it. And now I check HN and here we are.
Seems like ultimately they aren't actually able to track us as well as they claim.
It's interesting to see how the "non-linearity" is still very linear, it's just that you have three different goals at once.
I just finished re-playing Day of the Tentacle with my kid, and what's amazing about that is the intersecting non-linearity. The three different characters each have multiple of their own goals, but they're forever needing to trade things back and forth, so often the path of one will be blocked until the other one has gotten the thing they need.
The map for the goals for DOT must be like spaghetti.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YsollH04QK9si9uEm3VXZWT0snH...
I also remember that it was slightly difficult to buy the game - I was at least 13 at the time, the game had an age rating of 12, but (gasp!) there were skeletons on the cover, and the tag line mentioned corruption and crime. So the lady in the shop actually called her boss before eventually selling the game to me.
Is it Story -> Characters -> Puzzles?
Theme -> Characters -> Story -> Puzzles?
Or everything everywhere all at once?
Are the character descriptions in this doc leading the Story or derived from it?
How much of the story is built around Gameplay and its limitations? (I think I remember GF requiring 2 CDs?)
And this comment will prove it, by referencing only the very first part of the document, being the comment most likely to garner upvotes and replies, as opposed to deeper nuanced comments.
As a walkthrough, it is nice. But as the foundation for the game designers, it would be a fun because it is so lighthearted.
"Tim Schafer at Double Fine has posted the puzzle design spec for his classic adventure game, Grim Fandango. It is that game's tenth anniversary; it was released on the Day of the Dead, 1998."
My guess is it is kinda like a first draft that some higher ups approve and budgets and then dialogue and game development and puzzle testing can begin.
The doc itself is a good high level spec, useful as a walkthrough and for testing, but the detail in each puzzle description isn’t deep enough for someone to implement it.
I think this is indeed a doc pitched at higher-ups, where they want to know that the detail has been worked through, as the game exits the design phase and moves to full production, but don’t want the low level details.
I’d love to see a detailed process of how one of those puzzles was designed though.
I love the world, the characters, the music, and the art style. It was so inspiring for me as a child.
I literally hate the puzzles and the gameplay.
I recently went through it from start to finish as an adult and found it an incredible slog to get through. The puzzles, to me, made zero sense, which sucks the fun out of the game because the only possible way to solve them is to just try everything with everything or to look up the solution.
The latest Monkey Island. Now THAT's how you make a point-and-click adventure game!
That is the difference between Gilbert's game design versus Schafer's. I much prefer Gilbert.