10 Video Games That Only Exist Because Of Nostalgia

Released in 1998 by LucasArts, Grim Fandango was considered an immense success upon its initial release, and has since garnered numerous awards and copious recognition. To this day, the game is considered one of the best examples of the point-and-click genre, and is often cited as one of the most original and imaginative works of video game storytelling ever.

Well, here’s a contentious opinion for you: Grim Fandango is overrated. It’s a charming game with a great sense of personality, and the characters are written with depth and nuance, but the puzzles are tortuous and serve only to detract from the overall story. Often, you’ll find yourself genuinely invested in the plot, only to have that investment derailed continuously by overly-designed, overly-elaborate obstacles that utterly obliterate any and all sense of prolonged investment. At one point in the game, you literally spend twenty minutes filling balloons with cement in order to disrupt a postal delivery service, and good luck figuring that one out.

Grim Fandango is beautifully written, but poorly designed. In that respect, it really is a relic of its time, and a genuine triumph given the limitations of the technology. The remastered version has no excuse however, and serves only to highlight the original’s shortcomings. It’s the same story, complete with the same limitations, and while a few attempts have been made to modernise the experience, it continues to fall short in all the same places. The commercial success of Grim Fandango: Remastered can only be attributed to nostalgia, because Grim Fandango was never really a great game. You only remember it that way.