Grim Fandango Remastered – How to Pause the Game without Opening the Menu

Grim Fandango Remastered’s only pause functionality opens the menu. But you might want to pause the game while still seeing the game screen – for instance, to be able to read dialogue at your own pace. Here’s how to do it. This method should work for other games as well (and was specifically also tested with Full Throttle Remastered).

Disclaimers

All credit goes to Shingimel !

I did not create the game or any of the software products mentioned here, and am not responsible for their installation or use.

This guide is for the Windows OS, though I imagine there are ways to achieve this for Mac/Linux as well.

Why Would One Need to Pause without Opening the Menu?

You might want to pause the game while still seeing the game screen – for instance, to be able to read dialogue at your own pace. Specifically I wanted to have a convenient way to see the game dialogue in one window while working with Google Sheets translation function in the other, but I imagine there may be other uses to this.

How to Do It

1. Download PsTools and extract it to a folder on your computer, say “D:\Program Files (x86)\pstools”
2. Download and install AutoHotKey – “Current Version” works fine as of the time of this writing.
3. Save the following as a file named pause.ahk (or integrate it into your existing script, if you know what you’re doing), making sure that the path of pssuspend is the correct path in your system.

Pause::
T := !T
If T
{
Run, D:\Program Files (x86)\pstools\pssuspend.exe GrimFandango.exe
}
else
{
Run,D:\Program Files (x86)\pstools\pssuspend.exe -r GrimFandango.exe
}
return

4. Run the file.
5. Start the game. When you press the Pause key the game will pause. When you press it again, the game will resume.
6. You can activate the script when Windows starts by following the procedure here.

Notes and Troubleshooting

1. Notice that once you’ve paused, you’re technically “not in the game”. Switching context back to the game – that is, clicking within the game screen, would prevent you from resuming it. Specifically if you’re in full screen mode, it would also alert you that the game is stuck. Therefore, you shouldn’t click anywhere in the game screen once you’ve paused and until you’ve resumed it. You can obviously use other applications.

If you’ve accidentally clicked within the game screen, just alt-tab out of the game and then hit pause to resume the game.

2. The script above remaps the pause key – if you’re using it for anything else, you can just choose another key by changing the line at the top of the script and reloading it. You can do this by right clicking on the AutoHotKey icon in the system tray (a big H) and choosing “Edit this script”, and after correcting it, right clicking the icon again and choosing “Reload this script”.

What About Universal Pause Button?

It’s great! I love it. But since pause in UPB works in the context of the current application rather than outside of it, you basically can’t resume the game once you’ve switched context from it. UPB is a good solution if you don’t need to switch away from the game and just pause it and resume it – if that’s the use case, you’re probably better off using UPB since it’s a single, simple install.

Does This Work with Other Games?

Yes! You just need to get the application name for the game and replace GrimFandango.exe with it in the script. To do that, right click the task bar in windows and choose “Task Manager”. Then click on “Details” and look for the game executable name.

You then edit the AutoHotKey script accordingly and reload it. You can do this by right clicking on the AutoHotKey icon in the system tray (a big H) and choosing “Edit this script”, and after correcting it, right clicking the icon again and choosing “Reload this script”.

This was specifically tested to work with Full Throttle Remastered.