The world was made forever better by grim fandangos original release, the remaster has allowed this game to stay as relevant as it deserves.

Another installment in the recurring parade of old-school remasters, slotted neatly into the schedule amongst "Myst", "Monkey Island", "The Journeyman Project", "Postal" and our other favorite titles from long decades of yore. It's not that "Grim Fandango Remastered" is a bad game at all, but many modern remastered titles leave me feeling ambivalent and with mixed feelings about the features that studios choose to add while leaving out the important one that I'll come to in a moment.

The New GF features improvements in graphics (true) and more modern keyboard controls (also true) while also adding better sound quality (maybe) and stability improvements (a bald-faced lie) and packaged with the obligatory Director's Commentary accompanying any modern remaster. It's is also a joy to switch between them by hotkey in the same way as "Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition" making it possible to jump between nostalgia and contemporary in a single game depending on your mood. While the title does run well on either Windows or the Steam Deck, it is extraordinarily important to point out that the game breaking bugs have not been thoroughly ironed out in this release. The remaster doesn't include autosave, a disappointing relic of the original, and left at least one important game breaking bug in Year 3 that you should certainly know about as it can cost a player very valuable progress.

When the game doesn't bug out however, it remains an interesting story and comes together well. It's very organic and consistently unexpected throughout, so the old writing team still earns credit for originality. Some of this novelty is due to the story being a little loopy and not committed to logical uses for objects or environments. Much of the Petrified Forest puzzles and most of Year 4 confuse me even now, and I still don't understand what my character did in the botanist shop that advanced the plot. "Grim Fandango" falls into the same trap as "Syberia", "Full Throttle" and "Shivers" in that your character often must use every possession on every object to see which one does a thing in order to progress slightly. It's a small drip of dopamine when something works, but a long withdrawal when it isn't.

Which brings me to the cardinal sin of the title: No Hint System. As with "Monkey Island", it would have been sooo easy to implement and would have saved considerable time while also preserving some sense of accomplishment, but the devs omitted this lowest hanging fruit leaving the ordinary player with only complete walkthroughs, forcing a choice of the virtuous ironman route of trying every sensible or inane possibility, or damping the exploratory experience with a player's guide.

"Grim Fandango" still works as a hit of nostalgia or a cozy adventure or an artistic time capsule. But I can't judge it better than "satisfactory" for meeting minimums with the least possible effort. All of the boxes are checked off for the studio to earn another bag of money on old IP and consumers can have another go at this macabre journey, but the experience feels rote and joyless, much like the game's characters, part of a soulless journey to eventual insouciance.

although it's impossible to beat it without a guide, it was still an incredible game