Grisis a 2D platforming mood piece
about navigating grief. You play as a
nimble, blue-haired girl and you must
gradually bring colour and life back
to a world of monochrome ruins. To
do this, the girl must jump, float,
swim and slam her way through
stunning environments,
collecting glowing
lights and adding them
to the sky above a hub
area as constellations.
Tonally, Gris
inhabits the same arena
as Journey, Abzu,
Unravel, Flower...
perhaps Monument
Valley too, although not as closely due
to the latter’s puzzle elements. Gris
isn’t a puzzler, it’s a platformer with a
set of interactions which feel geared
around sensory pleasure – you end
up luxuriating in its environments
and effects, or enjoying the
smoothness of a set of movements.
To give an example, clusters of red
butterflies boost your jumps. In
another game this boost might feel
like part of a toolkit for exploration,
but Gris has generally linear
progression. At that point, the boost
isn’t a tool it’s part of the level’s
built-in choreography. At its best, Grisenables you to chain boosts together
with other interactions and create a
lovely flow and cadence.
As an exploration of grief, or an
emotional journey, Gris finds mixed
success. Its determination to be
beautiful is a problem here because it
means the ugly and
destructive sides of
grief or loss are absent.
The closest you get
in terms of what the
girl can do is the ability
to turn her cloak into a
heavy cube and use it
to smash vases, punch
through crumbling
floors, or plummet deeper into the
water. It’s destructive, sure, but it’s
also controlled and purposeful. The
wilder, scarier side of grief is cut off
from her; cauterised in favour of
fluid, deliberate action. It’s perhaps
found in some of the shadowy
creatures which pursue her, but that’s
external rather than internal.
The other problem is that the grief
is never effectively localised to a
particular person. Is the girl the one
grieving, or is it her companion (she
seems to be the one shattered into
pieces)? Being ambiguous isn’t a
problem per se, but I felt unable toread the basic emotional arc as a
coherent journey.PAINTING A PICTURE
This next paragraph is a spoiler so
skip ahead if you’d prefer to be
completely in the dark.
Another issue I have is that the
ending of the game is positive; a
reunification of sorts. I find it to be a
stumbling block when considering
Gris as a representation of grief. It’s
too neat; a manifestation of the idea
that grief ends when I don’t believe it
ever does. One of the best
descriptions of grief I’ve ever heard is
about how grief is not a specific
feeling, but a reckoning with what
can’t be undone. It changes over time,
for sure, but it’s an ongoing
confrontation, rather than a path to a
full resolution.
Gris is beautiful, but for me that
beauty means it’s only capable of
touching on some of the facets of
loss. It offers some of the colourless
strangeness of the world after a loss
and the seeping in of colour as you
open back up. It manages some of the
sense of being at the mercy of the
outside world. The way it plays with
scale shifts your focus from the girl to
the world and back again; a tool for
simulating numbness or distance.
But it can’t do the same for rage or
guilt or the way your insides seem to
be absent sometimes. The beauty gets
in the way there. It’s too self-
conscious, and too wrapped up in
being aesthetically pleasing. It’s too
tied to the idea of a neat conclusion.
It’s so caught up in the language of
recurring motifs that it doesn’t notice
when the emotional arc loses clarity.
The overall effect for me ends up
being elegant but detached. A slightly
muddled compendium of the
picturesque sides of grief.NEED TO KNOW
WHAT IS IT?
2D platforming journey
through grief.
EXPECT TO PAY
£14.50
DEVELOPER
Nomada Studio
PUBLISHER
In-house
REVIEWED ON
Core i7-5820k,
GTX 970, 16GB RAM,
Windows 10
MULTIPLAYER
None
LINK
http://www.nomada.studio66
Gris’s visual appeal
hindersasmuchasit
helps its attempted
exploration of the
grief process.VERDICTThe ugly and
destructive
sides of
grief or loss
are absentG
risis beautiful. It is beautiful in that highly stylised,
minimalist way that works well in both 2D platformers
and in art prints. It is beautiful in its carefully chosen
colour palettes and its delicate animation effects. However
it is beautiful in ways that both strengthen and weaken it
as an overall experience.INK PIECE
Painterly platformer GRIS aims
to explore grief. By Philippa Warr
COLOURING IN Other games with a focus on colour
THE UNFINISHED
SWAN
Fire blobs of ink into a
plain white world to reveal
the 3D landscape.SPLATOON
Nintendo’s third-person
shooter swaps bullets
for ink which covers the
play area.HUE
Change the background
colour of the world to
reveal or hide objects and
solve puzzles.DE BLOB
Pick up paint and smear
the city with colour by
touching it with your
character’s body.Gris
REVIEW