As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve started playing Grim Fandango Remastered. But between September baseball and me finally getting around to watching the brilliant Mr. Robot, I’ll be taking my time through Manny Calavera’s adventure en muerte. I’m still working through the first act of the game and am so far enjoying the quality dialogue that the game has to offer. It’s crazy that the rest of the industry still cannot match the excellence of writing produced by Tim Schafer’s team even 17 years after the fact. Add to that the inspired decision to set the game in the Land of the Dead from Mexican mythology and it is easy to see why the game is so beloved.

Of course, not everything in Grim Fandango necessarily holds up. I am not saying anything new by mentioning the obtuse 90s adventure game logic that governs progression. I knew this going in, but was taken aback by how often I was stuck trying to figure out the next thing to get the story moving. But that’s not what I want to discuss here. What I want to talk about is what I did in response to getting stuck; I looked up a walkthrough.

There’s a dirty feeling I get whenever I look up information or take a shortcut to get ahead in a game. It seems somehow wrong to subvert the game designer’s intent by just looking up the solution. Indeed, getting stuck and frustrated often makes it all the more satisfying when you do find a solution. You see this sort of design in the very best games, such as Portal or The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. In those games the solution comes into focus just as you would give up and you feel great about your deductive abilities. But then there are games where this sort of balance is not found, where finding the obtuse solution only aggravates the frustration a player feels. For most of us growing up, this wasn’t necessarily a problem as we had plenty of time to digest the few games we could afford. Now as responsibilities increase and free time is at a premium, I’ve begun to feel personally affronted when a game presents me with an obtuse puzzle and I am more likely to search up a walkthrough just to get through it. But then that familiar feeling creeps up; am I not experiencing the game the way it was meant to be played?

I am a very narrative-driven game player. I absolutely love games with strong stories, settings, or characters. That’s not to say that all I like are deep RPGs with reams of dialogue. Games such as Journey can also provide compelling narratives with a “show, don’t tell” approach. However, when gameplay informs the narrative (or vice-versa) in games such as in The Last of Us, it is there you can see the true brilliance of our medium. The interactivity and subsequent immersion into a world is what makes video games great and keeps me obsessed with them. The flipside of that coin is oftentimes the gameplay can be a stumbling block for this immersion. Take Uncharted 3 for example, which had several points where difficulty spikes forced me to retry over and over again. Through all this repetition the game just became one rote combat encounter after another. The charm of Naughty Dog’s setting and story were lost in a pile of combat mechanics that I awkwardly tried to get a handle on. It wasn’t until I bumped the difficulty down to easy that I was able to fully immerse myself in Nathan Drake’s journey. I broke authorial intent by changing the difficulty from normal (“the way it was meant to be played”), but I enjoyed the game a lot more than I would have otherwise.

To bring this all back to Grim Fandango, I am still compelled to see the game through despite the fact that I am alt+tab-ing my way to the guide every little while. It doesn’t feel like that much of a loss, and I do try to solve things on my own before consulting the solution. The story, art, and characters are still all there and keep me interested throughout, and the fact that I am not solving the puzzles myself does not change that fact. Am I subverting Tim Schafer’s vision by playing the game this way? Sure, but if it’s between finishing the game with help or not finishing it at all, I’ll take the former.