I'm surprised to see people reporting so much difficulty with Grim Fandango, but it may just be a difference in background. I was very much into PC puzzle-adventures when it came out and had worked through most of the big guns from LucasArts, so I've played it multiple times through since the pre-release demo in 1998 (with long, long breaks to forget the puzzles), never with a guide, and never had much trouble; it's actually pretty streamlined next to many of its precursors, as from Full Throttle onwards, Tim Schafer generally confined item puzzles to smaller chapters and environments (compared to the game-long sprawl of his masterpiece, Day of the Tentacle). The main hurdle with Grim back in its own day was the switch to 3D, back when it only had tank controls and you had to follow the character's eyeline to see which objects were interactive.
I will admit, in hindsight, that the whole Petrified Forest sequence (unfortunately pretty early in the game, in Act I) is pretty rough and finicky—there's a slight execution barrier even when you do see what to do—but Act II is itself one of the greatest puzzle-adventure chapters and one of the most memorable towns in video games, and worth the price of admission. It's too bad the roughest patch of the game hits so early on. I've always rated this game as one of my great favourites, especially due to the artwork and writing, although in retrospect I've come to see DotT as the superior design.
It's not the same kind of systems-driven logic-puzzle experience as Baba Is You at all. PC adventures that evolved from text-based to graphical form had their own conventions that were all about thinking along chains of item/environment lock-and key interactions: pop this lock to get this key, and so on, while exploring all the dialogue options to get a clear idea of your ultimate objective. I suppose it is a bit of an acquired skill to intuitively "read" the genre like how a person with Mario experience would read a platforming game, or a person with Metroid experience would read Hollow Knight's map. It's interesting to see a totally different perspective on the difficulty from others here who might not have gone into Grim via that progression.
I will admit, in hindsight, that the whole Petrified Forest sequence (unfortunately pretty early in the game, in Act I) is pretty rough and finicky—there's a slight execution barrier even when you do see what to do—but Act II is itself one of the greatest puzzle-adventure chapters and one of the most memorable towns in video games, and worth the price of admission. It's too bad the roughest patch of the game hits so early on. I've always rated this game as one of my great favourites, especially due to the artwork and writing, although in retrospect I've come to see DotT as the superior design.
It's not the same kind of systems-driven logic-puzzle experience as Baba Is You at all. PC adventures that evolved from text-based to graphical form had their own conventions that were all about thinking along chains of item/environment lock-and key interactions: pop this lock to get this key, and so on, while exploring all the dialogue options to get a clear idea of your ultimate objective. I suppose it is a bit of an acquired skill to intuitively "read" the genre like how a person with Mario experience would read a platforming game, or a person with Metroid experience would read Hollow Knight's map. It's interesting to see a totally different perspective on the difficulty from others here who might not have gone into Grim via that progression.
