Gris (PS4)
When it comes to determining a game’s quality, I like to say there are two pillars: Gameplay and Story. A game doesn’t need to be strong in both, but one or the other must be strong enough to support a good game. However, there is a bit of a third unofficial pillar that certainly influences how a game can be weighed: Artistry. The music and visuals can definitely improve a game when done well, but it’s difficult to say a game could thrive on artistic appeal alone. After all, gameplay will determine how you interact with what you’re seeing or hearing, and the way you experience the sights and sounds the game offers can be a story itself even without a true narrative binding it all together. Gris is a game with gameplay and story though, but its decision to emphasize its art over those leaves it in an odd spot as the two pillars are fairly plain while the visuals and sound are certainly breathtakingly beautiful.
Gris is a side-scrolling puzzle platformer in how it plays, but that’s not quite where the focus should lie when first taking a look at this experience. Gris tells a wordless story about grief and coping with intense emotional pain, but save for a few scenes, you don’t get too many details on exactly what the protagonist went through. One of the clearest scenes in regards to portraying some of our heroine’s painful history requires you to collect plenty of the optional glowing lights known as Mementos, the game at least tying that bit of exploration to a meaningful reward by withholding that narrative puzzle piece. For the most part the game is wrapped in heavy visual metaphors, and while some of the name for the Playstation Trophies make it sound like a rather rote exploration of the cliche five stages of grief, those too are optional content and mostly take the form of some rather well realized statues depicting someone experiencing rather powerful emotions.
Gris, that being the name of the game and the girl you play as, begins her journey by losing her voice, and her quest to overcome her sadness does seem to be one with a bit more depth than the outdated stages of grief template. When the adventure begins you walk across a stark white landscape slowly, a sketchy black line indicating the ground and not much else. However, as you venture forward you’ll begin to explore more richly detailed locations and start to restore color to the world, each infusion of a new hue practically dabbing the world with watercolors to start to restore it to life. The areas you explore are quickly realized with more professional artistic talent, large buildings and statues making for stark images and serving as part of the area you’re navigating. Certain spaces are realized with smooth sweeping lines, trees use few overlapping lines so their branches extend out like pipes, and simple shapes like large squares and half circles can give certain spaces a minimalist feel despite the clear level of detail still present. Damage to the environment certainly seems to coincide with Gris trying to rebuild her psyche after the emotional devastation experienced in her previously normal life, but I hesitate to ascribe any one art style to the game as it does seem to advance through different artistic approaches as the new colors are unlocked.
In fact, the colors do seem to line up with an emotional focus of the segment. After regaining the color green, you explore a forest where a small sprite assists in puzzle solving for a time, and in the red deserts you spend many times just trying to ground yourself as heavy winds threaten to blow you away. There are calm relaxing moments where the world around you seems practically ethereal or almost like a specter of a city rather than one that truly exists, but there is also danger in a black amorphous being who crops up in many different daunting forms. You are never at risk of dying in Gris and usually this manifestation of dark emotions is meant to hinder you or otherwise spur you forward with the threat it poses, but this exploration of grief does seem to try and never push too hard against the player or jeopardize their ability to progress.
In fact, that might be where Gris stumbles some, as it might be a bit too straightforward in how its puzzles and platforming unfold. Gris’s adventure of emotional recovery isn’t just a tour of impressive sights with some lovely and often serene music playing over such exploration, it actually has a fair bit of platforming challenges and puzzles to complete. The game does have safety nets for missing jumps to continue with its focus on trying to ensure the player keeps moving forward, but the platforming is perhaps too plain for how much of the adventure involves it. The game reuses the idea of the platforms ahead alternating in and out of existence or shifting shape at set intervals and it’s not much of a challenge to get the rhythm for crossing them right. However it still keeps pulling this concept out later down the line, and while you soon get new abilities, those skills don’t evolve the gameplay much. You can have Gris turn into a cube to increase her weight so she can smash down on things and she’ll later get more movement options like swimming, but these abilities aren’t developed much beyond the basics. The introductions for them are usually a nice shift into something novel for a bit, but after that early phase of playing with a new means of interaction, your use of such abilities remains pretty basic or purely functional.
There are, on occasion, the Mementos to find off the beaten path that sometimes prod you to do something a bit more interesting with your platforming skills, but there isn’t much substance to how you interact with the world. You’ll be presented a screen with a small trial to overcome and outside of a few moments like one involving a pulse of light that creates an ice double of Gris you won’t see any strong mechanics intersect with your skills, and even that one comes and goes too quickly as you get back to simpler navigation. It keeps lightly poking at ideas like an area where things light up when you’re near them to make ground appear, but the challenge is often just approach the illuminating object and platform easily across what it revealed. It does a solid job keeping you occupied but whether the activity is meant to be a challenge or part of the extended visual metaphor at play it still feels like the gameplay is far too present for how little it is adding to the experience. A segment that is meant to be evocative may look gorgeous, but then you’re doing platforming that sometimes boils down to just waiting for the right moment or puzzles that aren’t intellectually stimulating. With its light touch in the story department with interpretation meant to carry the load, you’re often playing through a stretch of the game with only the background art and soundtrack to motivate you to keep going, but at least the game is short enough it can be completed in a night, that length helping the plain platforming avoid overstaying its welcome while also making it easier to string together the symbolic meaning of its world.
THE VERDICT: There are some absolutely beautiful backgrounds in Gris and the composition of its music layers in more emotion into a symbolic story, but appreciating it is hindered some by the video game elements attached to it. An art gallery that requires you to linger on its work for too long would lose its efficacy, and while the artistry in Gris is both gorgeous and encapsulates the tone of its unspoken narrative, the puzzle platforming leaves you lingering on it too long. The striking coloring choices and background art doesn’t hold the focus as you need to time simple jumps for short puzzles, the game not moving along quite quickly enough to let you simply bask in the experience. It rarely stumbles in the design of its gameplay, but the humdrum platforming and straightforward puzzles seem oddly out of sorts with music and visuals that push so hard to resonate with the player.
And so, I give Gris for PlayStation 4…
An OKAY rating. There are a few particular moments in Gris where the color spreads out through the world or the sometimes understated music punches in with a powerful composition that really would have been emotional lynch pins had this game not dillydallied with its puzzle platforming so long. It’s not really drawn out so much as it lingers on the wrong things, the game providing some striking visuals only for you to spend more time running around the less exciting crumbling temple or dark cave. At times like with the windstorm in the red desert you can easily see the visual metaphor at play for this part of Gris’s emotional journey but others it can seem like you’re puttering around with familiar ideas that are evolving in such small steps they never reach a point where they’re contributing much either to the wordless story or the enjoyment of the gameplay. You won’t be hindered from making progress at least so you can push on through and eventually get to the next moment where you can be wowed by the artistry on offer, but with its absolutely massive art book and the soundtrack you can probably get most of the game’s best features without the plain platforming challenges that slow down your ability to appreciate them. You’d certainly be robbed of some of the narrative’s intended resonance with everything presented without it’s appropriate placement in sequence though.
Gris’s choice to leave so much unspoken does mean its emotional journey is almost looking for hooks in your own experiences to add greater emotional weight to what fractions of story it offers. That focus on sensation does feel like it can draw things out better than detailed story beats if you are looking to process something that happened to you, but the gameplay really doesn’t carry its weight even if you’re coming to the game for that reason. That therapeutic angle is lost some with too much weight placed on unambitious environmental challenges, but the action’s unexceptional design doesn’t dip into anything so dry it hurts the efficacy of the imagery. The player’s experience will probably come down to how they can compartmentalize parts of the experience and empathize with the metaphorical exploration of loss. The story and gameplay really aren’t much but the beautifully drawn world and music are definitely worthy of praise, but when you weigh it all up it feels disingenuous to ignore how much the game leans on its superb aesthetic direction. Had Gris devoted itself to allowing you to experience it, perhaps even being more of a narrative exploration game instead of a puzzle platformer, then it could earn plenty of unqualified praise as the artistic excellence would be its sole focus. The gameplay insists you pay attention to it though and thus it’s harder to just come right out and recommend the game for its clear artistic merit. If more moments had better lined up play with purpose then it could feel like a more full-bodied experience, but it can feel like interacting with the world is often more to keep you occupied than to play into the key themes. You won’t suffer during those platforming challenges and puzzles, but they do weaken one’s investment in the rest of the experience by keeping you away from its more brilliant moments of artistry for a bit too long.