Grim Fandango

Grim Fandango came out in 1998 as LucasArts' last major adventure game, and at the same time as its first to drop hand-drawn characters in favor of polygonal models moving across pre-rendered backdrops. The player takes on Manny Calavera, a clerk at a travel agency in the Land of the Dead who sells his clients tickets for a four-year journey to eternal rest. When he discovers someone is systematically stealing the best souls and sentencing them to a walk across the wasteland instead, he sets off after a fraud that reaches all the way to the top of that world. The story unfolds across four acts, with a full year passing between each, and with every jump the setting, Manny's standing, and the cast of characters around him all change.

Control dropped the cursor in favor of directly controlling the character from the keyboard: Manny turns his head toward whatever can be interacted with, and the player confirms the action. Solving puzzles relies on combining items in the inventory, carefully examining locations, and conversations with branching responses, and several puzzles rank among the toughest that nineties adventure games ever offered. Technically this was the debut of the GrimE engine, which allowed changing camera angles and lighting scenes so they felt cinematic. The game ran under Windows and could take advantage of the emerging 3D acceleration of the time, although the control scheme itself became the most frequent target of contemporary criticism.

Visually it's a blend of the Mexican Día de los Muertos holiday, art deco architecture, and film noir, accompanied by jazz and orchestral music that changes with each city along with the story's mood. The dialogue ranks among the best-written in the genre's entire history, and the humor never overpowers the melancholy tone of a story about a journey with no way back. Critics received the game enthusiastically and ranked it among the year's finest, but sales fell short and, together with other titles, contributed to the decline of classic adventure games. Today Grim Fandango plays without a hitch thanks to a later remastered version, and its storytelling and visual style have aged only minimally.