Welcome, traveler. Please take a number and have a seat. I'm Lisa Bronson, your agent for the duration, and I promise I am a better agent than Manny was at the start of the game.

In real life I'm a graphic designer at a printing company in Denver, which explains the deco. I've played every LucasArts adventure since Maniac Mansion, back when you built every sentence out of the verbs at the bottom of the screen. I have opinions about every one of them. I have been through Grim Fandango twice, once fast and stuck and frustrated, and once slow, with a notebook. This guide is the notebook, typed up, so that you can have the second trip the first time.

Grim Fandango came out last October. It's Tim Schafer's game, the same Tim Schafer who gave us Full Throttle and had a hand in Day of the Tentacle, and it is the most beautiful thing LucasArts has ever made. Picture the Mexican Day of the Dead, with all its skeletons and paper flowers, crossed with an old black-and-white crime picture full of fedoras, cigarette smoke, rain and double-crosses. Then add a big band.

Manny Calavera is a travel agent at the Department of Death, in the city of El Marrow. When you die, you land in the Land of the Dead, and you have a four-year walk ahead of you to reach your final rest in the Ninth Underworld. A travel agent's job is to sell you a better way to go. If you led a good life, you're entitled to the best package there is: a ticket on the Number Nine, a train that makes the four-year trip in four minutes. Manny badly needs a client like that. He hasn't had one in a long time, and his rival down the hall, Domino, keeps getting all the good ones.

Then Manny meets Meche, a woman who should qualify for the Number Nine if anybody ever did. But the system says she gets nothing, and she sets out on foot, alone. And Manny, who can't stand it, goes after her, with Glottis, a huge, orange, lovable demon who lives to drive and would rather fix a car than eat.

The game is split into four parts, one for each year of the journey. Each year jumps ahead and takes you somewhere new, and that's how this guide is laid out too.

Yes. I know. Everybody complains, and everybody's right, at least for the first hour.

There's no mouse. You don't point and click like in every LucasArts game before it. You steer Manny around with the arrow keys, or a joystick if you have one, like driving a little car: up walks him forward, left and right turn him. Every time the camera cuts to a new angle, you have to stop and work out which way he's facing, and you will walk Manny into a wall. Then you will turn him around and walk him into another wall. This is normal. It passes.

The keys you need: E to examine, U to use, P to pick up, and I for your inventory. Manny keeps everything in his coat, and when you open the inventory he takes the things out one at a time, which is charming the first time and slower the hundredth.

My best tip for the whole game: watch Manny's head. When he walks past something you can use, he turns and looks at it. If you're stuck in a room, walk slowly along every wall and watch where he looks. Half of my "stuck" moments the first time through were things he was staring right at.

Every puzzle gets two things. First a Travel Tip, which is a nudge. Read it, go back to the game, try again. If you're still stuck, there's an Itinerary underneath, which is the answer. It's printed in black on black, so you can't read it by accident. To read it, drag your mouse across the box to highlight it, and the words will show up. Like this:

The big story turns are kept behind Passenger Advisory warnings, and they're also blacked out. Nothing on a year's page gives away anything from a later year. You can read Year One without learning a thing about Year Two.

A few general tips before you board:

• Talk to everybody, and go through every line of dialogue. The writing is the best part, and it's where most of your clues are hiding.
• Try every item in your coat on everything that looks interesting, and then try it on Glottis.
• Save often, in different slots. The game is kind, and you can't die (you're already dead). But you'll want to go back and watch scenes again, trust me.
• Take breaks. A puzzle that makes no sense at midnight often solves itself over breakfast.