GRIS is a short platformer that builds its entire experience on visuals, music and feeling rather than challenge. The player guides a young girl through a world that has collapsed along with her, moving through a landscape that begins almost colourless and gains a new part of its palette with each new area. The game uses no dialogue, no text and no quest markers, relying entirely on the player understanding where to go and what is happening from the composition of the scene itself. The theme is clearly about coping with loss, yet the game never states this directly and leaves the interpretation open.
The gameplay is deliberately non-confrontational. There is no way to die, no enemies in the usual sense and no time limits; instead the player jumps, climbs, swims and solves undemanding environmental puzzles. Along the way she gains new abilities, such as turning into a heavy stone block that withstands gale winds and breaks through fragile surfaces, or the ability to swim and later move through currents. Each ability opens up a different kind of environment, and the game introduces it, develops it and lets it fade away within a few minutes, so the pacing is always in motion.
The audiovisual presentation is the main reason the game earned so much attention. Hand-painted watercolour visuals combine flat colour fields with delicate animation and sweeping panoramas, where the character is often a tiny speck within an enormous vista. On Switch the game looks great both handheld and on the TV, and the smooth performance reinforces the sense of a painted film. The music by the Catalan group Berlinist, with piano, strings and a female vocal, is timed to the scenes so closely that it often shifts mood at the exact moment of transition between screens. Critics praised the game especially for its aesthetics and its sensitive way of guiding the player, while more critical voices took issue with its low difficulty. Today GRIS is one of the most frequently cited examples of a game experienced as an artistic work, one that can be finished in a single evening and yet stays in memory much longer.
Game 93 of 188 for Nintendo Switch
