LucasArts, 1998
Successful is the game attached to the well-known name of LucasArts, the company that elevated the adventure games genre to the highest levels by floating games like Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion, Sam & Max Hit the Road and Indiana Jones series.
Now, LucasArts introduces another unforgettable character named Manny Calavera, the Grim Reaper and travel agent in the land of the dead. Manny's job is to provide his clients the best travel package available for the four-year trip through the land of the dead to heaven but suddenly all his good clients are taken away by Domino, another travel agent in his firm. This terrible situation leaves him no choice but to deal with bad and criminal clients, which causes nothing but trouble. Meanwhile, Manny gets a chance to steal one of Domino's clients, Meche, a pure hearted soul but he couldn't help her with anything as something is mysteriously wrong with his computer so he leaves her to travel all of the journey walking. Manny later realizes his mistake and sets off on a journey to find Meche and apologize to her. During his adventure, he meets an underworld mob and learns the truth about the land of the dead. The game has four chapters that represents each year of the journey and in every chapter you use a different medium of travelling that starts from a hotrod automobile to hotrod boat and finally a hotrod Gondola.
Grim Fandango features top-notch graphics quality, a real eye-candy. All the backgrounds are beautifully pre-rendered in 3D with every detail possibly available to make the atmosphere real. All the characters are created in 3D and their movements can smoothly be manipulated using a keyboard-controlled interface, which might be a little hard to get used to in the beginning. Another excellent features are the superb quality of voice-acting, highly entertaining atmospheric music and sound effects. In short, Grim Fandango is one of the best adventure games I have ever played and I will never get tired playing it over and over again.
