Episode 112 - Grim Husbando - Grim Fandango

You got anymore dead podcasts back there? Welcome back to NOCLIP,
and thank you for joining us for the conclusion of Mystery May! To
round this month out, we’re going to be talking about one of the
most prolific adventure games ever made, Grim Fandango. Grim is one
of LucasArts’ adventure games from the heyday of the genre, and the
studio’s experience combines with the Tim Schaffer’s stellar
writing to create one of the most celebrated adventure games of the
era. There is a lot of enjoyment to be found in the characters
presented here, and on top of that, the mechanics, while not
perfect, make puzzle solving a decidedly more fair task than it has
been in past games, with a simple inventory system and little to no
pixel hunting, depending on how you define that. As for what makes
Grim such a strong entry, we think it boils down to a great sense
of worldbuilding and a streamlining of the features that made
adventure games sort of an inaccessible genre for many years. We’re
going to be talking about why Manny Calavera is a cool character
while still being a good one, the puzzles and how many are very
readable despite the fact that some still stumped us, and we
determine that we are, in fact, big Man Boys. Thank you for joining
us again this week, and this year for another Mystery May. Grim was
a perfect game to revisit for this month because of its themes, but
is also a perennial favorite and we don’t get to talk too much
about point and click games these days as the genre has sort of
fallen by the wayside. We hope you enjoyed, and you can let us know
if you’re an adventure game fan in the comments or over on our
Discord! We’ve continued the Mystery May theme for a few years now,
probably in spite of our best interests, but do you have any
suggestions of what to cover next year? Let us know, but next time
we’re heading into June and talking about The Outer Wilds (which
could arguably fall into this theme, but whatever)!