GRIS (PC): Short but sweet

It's always a risky when a creator you know changes up things. Sometimes is great, and you get the jump from Evil Within to Evil Within 2. Sometimes it's not great, when you jump from The Black Album to Load. Creators are ultimately artists and it is certainly their prerogative to do things differently if they so chose. But in the realm of video games this can sometimes be a gamble.

So you can imagine my surprise when I started seeing screens and gifs from Devolver Digital for an upcoming artsy platformer. This is a company that produces silly and quirky games like BroForce and Enter the Gungeon. But a pretty looking indie platformer? That's not their normal wheelhouse. That being said I was hearing some very positive things about it, so with a free gap in my stream schedule to use, I took the plunge into.....

GRIS (PC)

As is with most indie games, there is no vocalized story. It's a journey you have to go on to interpret your own meanings. The game begins with young woman eponymously named Gris curled up in a cracked stone hand. She beings to sing but as she does, the hand beneath her beings to crack further and fall apart. Suddenly the girl loses her voice and cannot sing. She rushes to the edge to evade the cracking fingers, but the hand breaks apart and Gris falls down to a white and grey colorless void. From here, we take control.

This is going to be a tricky review for a number of reasons. Mainly because I don't want to provide any spoilers if you are looking to try this one for yourself, but also because there are not a lot of mechanics to this one, and there is a reasonably short playtime. This might actually be one of the shortest reviews I write come the end of this.

So when you assume control of the game all you can really do move left and right. When Gris (as I believe she is actually called) gets some speed to her step, you will be able to jump. Another button will show her lift her arms and tilt her head back, but it does not do anything.

As you walk through the stages you will come across roadblocks and gaps that you will need to find ways across. When you come across a gap you typically will be noted by a some chimes of sound and what appears to be a hollow constellation. As you continue, you will be herded to find what appears to be stars in the environment. These will connect on the gaps where you found the constellations, and will sometimes provide you a light bridge to cross, or a new ability to use, or fly up into the sky to a constellation that you will continue to build on as you play through the game.

There are only a small handful of mechanics to this game, but the game does use them in interesting way to create a slew of puzzles as you progress through the game. Some of them using more than one if not all of them, on top of some other mechanics that are introduced specifically for that section of the level. Some examples are some red butterflies that allow Gris to essentially launch into the sky, or a line that when you break through it flips and inverses the gravity. The game also uses some water mechanics as well.

For lack of a better explanation, the games elements are somewhat founded by the use of their colors. As Gris progresses through the game and you hit checkpoints, the game will explode with a splash of a specific color, and that will introduce a new environment mechanic. Such as when I hit blue, all of the water based mechanics and puzzles came into effect. Now that I am reflecting on it, the puzzle elements do have a symmetry to the color used for that specific portion and is very cleverly done so.

There is also a degree of inspirations to similar games of this type. There is a segment very early on that is basically a stylized variant of something that happens in PlayStation's indie game Journey, right down to it occurring in the colored level that would closest match Journey's setting. There are a couple of little nods like this, so I see them more as homages to inspirations rather than lifting an idea.

The visuals in Gris are simply stunning. The entirety of the game is drawn in a stylized hand painted water color. It has almost a comic line coloring to it, but as I streamed it was told it reminded one viewer of a movie called Fantastic Planet for its uses of silent and flowy animations. As I played through it, I couldn't help but feel a drawn comparison to the Cloud segment of the old anime Robot Carnival, another film drawn in that 70s animation style.

Its score is just absolutely gorgeous. Somber piano notes, strings, wind and occasionally some accompanying vocalization.  It blends with Gris' visual design seamlessly, and fits with the indie narrative that it is trying to tell. It's an incredibly chill and beautiful soundtrack, and kudos to the Berlinist for their work on it.

I could almost make the complaint that the its soundtrack is too chill. I had this same problem when I played Nier:Automata that when I was playing the early stages of the game, the slow pace of the progress combined with this chill (but beautiful) OST was quite literally putting me sleep. I'm trying to host an interesting stream and I am yawning and struggling to keep my eyes open. It is not a good look and not doing the game any favors.

The puzzles are well thought out and use a number of the mechanics in interesting ways. Although outside of a few of them, I wouldn't say that the game is very difficult. There were only a handful of moments where I got slightly hung up as I was trying to solve the game or gather a collectibles. The collectibles in the game are called "memories" and when you finish the game you can go back to previous levels to try to find the rest of them. If you do, you can unlock one more final scene to the story.

Doing this can add some length to the game because like I said earlier, it's not very long. I played the game on a stream and start to finish I had the main playthrough done in just about 3 hours or so. I am not sure if going back to find memories allows you to use the abilities you gained in the playthrough, but I feel at best this would only add maybe an hour or two of extra gameplay tops.

So this begs the question, is 16.99 worth three hours of entertainment to you? I managed to nab the game for 15.29 so I suppose I can say I got the same amount of experience that I would have if I spent that money at the movies. If that's the comparison I am using, that's probably fair because that means that Gris is not overstaying its welcome, and it wrapped up its story before its actual gameplay mechanics started to feel samey and derivative of its own experience.

On the other hand, I am also a gamer and it's hard for me to not feel short changed sometimes when I buy a new game and inside of a sitting or two I have done all that I can with it. Like I've said in other reviews, replayability is a big factor for me when it comes to buying a game, and it's hard to say that Gris really has any if I can do all the game has to offer in only 2 or 3 sittings.

With a game like this it's not easy for me to give a a proper recommendation because you sometimes have to look at these kinda indie games as the art pieces they are.  If you are the type of person who is okay parting with 20 bucks for 3 hours of an experience then I would absolutely say to try Gris. If on the other hand you are one who really needs a game to have some meat on it then you could probably get by watching a stream or let's play of it.

But that really is the best way to describe Gris at its whole: it is an experience.  A beautifully scored, very pretty experience. I'd think part of the fun of it is to play through and talk to others about what you think the game meant, and what you took from its visual cues. While I didn't have the same emotional connection I did in a game like Journey, I still enjoyed Gris very much. Whether you opt to buy or view it, it's absolutely worth your time.

The stick legs and arms were an odd choice, though.