video-games

Thus far, the games I’ve recommended have all been of a very recent vintage so how about we look at one of the canon classics?

Grim Fandango is an adventure game written by Tim Schafer, originally released in 1998, presumably for the Ediphone. Since then it’s been remastered and released on virtually every console you can imagine.

The game takes place in the Aztec underworld, reimagined in 1950s Art Deco style, and follows Manny Calavera, a travel agent whose job is to sell travel packages for newly dead souls beginning their four year journey across the Land of the Dead. Frustrated by the poor quality of his clients, he poaches the case of the beautiful, virtuous Mercedes Colomar and ends up inadvertently exposing a corrupt conspiracy at the heart of the afterlife.

And while I definitely recommend playing it, I do have a couple caveats.

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I’ve been binge watching The Tick for a future episode of the podcast (so much better than I remembered, and I remembered it pretty damn fondly) and I was struck by something that happens in episode four, The Tick versus Mr Mental where the Tick is forced to confront his greatest fear: WORKING IN AN OFFICE.

Dispatch is a 2025 superhero adventure game by AdHoc Studios released on Windows, Playstation 5, X-Box and Switch. And it, too, mines humour from the incongruity of a superhero working in a mundane office setting. But the way the game depicts this is very different from the way The Tick did thirty-two (JESUS CHRIST) years ago in ways that are both interesting and (to me, at least) kinda depressing.

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