Manual and box already catch the eye of the mystery fan, as – using a lot of dark colours – they summon up a story of magicians in parallel worlds, about magical portals and about a hub called Nietoom. The aura of the phantastic genre is there. The manual also helps understanding the game's starting screen. You find yourself in the bedroom of your late grandfather who, until his death, researched the location of this portal of worlds. The room is shown with a crooked horizon line and the player's avatar is actually nowhere to be seen. Maybe the now missing grandfather is supposed to be symbolic for a world in turmoil. In order to leave the room and to really start your task, you have to – as described in the manual – search the side of the screen until you find a door in the back of the viewpoint. It is only in the next room – the upper staircase of the mansion – that you can actually take a look at the protagonist: a youthful figure neatly dressed in a kind of dressing gown, sporting full, perfectly groomed hair. Though is this prissy grandson the character a Lucas Arts afficionado would like to identify with?
On a normal workday, research chemist Caren discovers a headless human body in one of the biologists' tanks. Who does it belong to? What has happened? And why does anybody make a new Adventure game on the C64 in 2015? At least the last question is easy to answer: because they can!
Inspired by early Lucasfilm Adventures, Caren offers a very slick game experience. You move a cursor around the screen with a joystick. A simple button press will make Caren go there (if possible). Keeping the button pressed for a second or so (configurable) will open an action menu, from where you can either examine or handle ("use") something or combine it with an inventory object.
For a long time I thought of Grim Fandango as the ‘LucasArts game with the skeletons’, whose appeal was a total mystery to me. Maybe it was because back then, when the game was released, I had been somewhat over-saturated (like many others) by countless adventure games. Also they started copying each other more and more and most of the time provided some awfully boring ideas. Still a game, in which you slip into the role of a bony man, seemed just too silly. In the meantime adventure games are returning again and LucasArts finally closed its gates. So after fifteen years I decided to fill a gap in my knowledge.