Playing classic adventure Grim Fandango again is like seeing a skeleton get up and start walking around – which is exactly what afterlife travel agent Manny Calavera does in this Day of the Dead-inspired tale. It joyously exhumes the corpses of both fallen genre titan LucasArts and Grim Fandango itself, whose out-of-print and unsupported status had rendered it nearly impossible to find – let alone play – over the past decade and a half.

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PlayStation Vita Impressions

Adventure games tend to age better than other genres because their gameplay is so story-focused, and so it’s no surprise that Grim Fandango remains a fine experience in 2015. However, one missed opportunity for improvement is that, like many games of the ‘90s, there is no tutorial available. You’re simply thrown headfirst into the adventure, and any “How do I do that?” questions that would’ve been answered by the thick instruction manual you were expected to read before you played (heck, it was part of the fun!) are left a mystery here. As a $15 download, Grim Remastered obviously doesn’t include a booklet. And while you can check the button layout in the Options screen – Fandango feels completely natural on DualShock 4, by the way, and there’s a new feels-like-it-was-always-there point-and-click interface option on PC – you’re given no other context for what you’re actually supposed to do. If you’re familiar with Telltale’s modern adventures, you’ll have a basic idea, but Grim is a much deeper, more complex quest than the Walking Deads and Wolves Among Us you’re used to nowadays.As I progressed, Grim reminded me that adventure games of yore expected a lot more from players than most games do today. That’s hardly a bad thing, but it can be a bit jarring if you’re coming to this classic for the first time. Over this beautiful and dramatic 12-hour adventure, you’ll have to talk to a lot of memorable characters, collect a lot of items, and use them in creative and often bizarre ways, so you’ll need either an excellent memory or a notepad and pen to keep track of your current goals (especially if you take a day or two off in the middle of your playthrough). It’s a lot to keep track of, and Grim Fandango won’t help you out in any way.The four-year tale of Manny as he tries to work off spiritual debts by selling expedited afterlife travel to paradise (read: heaven) so he can eventually get there himself is a gripping one, packed with film noir influences, a stellar jazzy soundtrack, and light touches of comedy too. It’s split into four years, with each one – particularly the film noir-heavy Year 2 – chock full of locations, characters, and items. Glottis, your netherworld demon sidekick whose sole reason to exist is to drive vehicles, is easily my favorite character – particularly as his role evolves into piano player, lounge singer, and shipman. But even the archetypal NPCs are well-written, well-acted, and generally interesting.I say this is a 12-hour story, but like any adventure game, you’ll only progress as fast as you can solve puzzles, and that will vary depending on how good you are at sussing out wacky adventure game logic. Most of your challenges make sense, but I wouldn’t call any of them flat-out easy. More often than not, there’s something that requires you to dig into your gray matter a bit deeper than a modern game would. Frustration is inevitable – it’s part of the genre – but when you finally figure out what you missed, it’s incredibly rewarding.However, while I never flat-out cheated on any puzzles by looking up their solutions online , I do wish Grim Fandango Remastered had added a hint system similar to the stellar Monkey Island 1 and 2 Special Editions, which provided bigger and bigger hints as you continued to press the hint button before ultimately giving you the solution. The one puzzle that made me absolutely mental was (no spoilers) the multi-part counterfeit betting-stub machine task near the end of Year 2. Be ready for that.Just as the excellent craft behind Grim’s story means it’s no less engrossing today than it was in 1998, its 3D graphics have also held up surprisingly well. Because Grim has such unique art direction, its low-polygon characters haven’t aged as poorly as you’d expect. In fact, the original pre-rendered backgrounds help the graphics look borderline modern. Thus, switching back and forth between the original and remastered graphics on the fly only changes the characters, whose detail and lighting are cleaned up for 2015. The only thing that really disappointed me was the lack of a true 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio (a stretched 16:9 option is available, but it looks awful), which means we’re stuck with black bars on the sides of our screens.Should you elect to play Grim Fandango Remastered on the Vita, you’ll be in for a portable treat. The handheld version cleverly offers both the PS4’s gamepad controls and the PC’s point-and-click controls simultaneously, letting you mix and match on the fly and on a whim. Visuals look clean on the Vita’s screen, too, though the 4:3 aspect ratio is extra painful here because of the already limited screen real estate (again, do not attempt to use the hideous 16:9 stretching option). On a similar note, the Vita’s screen also occasionally stings during scenes when the camera is pulled way back, making Manny a mere few pixels tall. But Cross-Buy and Cross-Save functionality means your $15 gets you both PlayStation versions, and you’re able to seamlessly carry your save files back and forth between the two. That’s a huge plus.