GRIS is a wonderful example of when a game doesn’t do anything extraordinary or anything new, yet what it does it does really well. It looked so “seen it all before” in trailers and bits of gameplay, that I didn’t consider playing it myself. And now that I have played, it’s not like my expectations were completely off. Yet, I enjoyed this game quite a lot.
GRIS is a 2D platforming adventure game, not entirely unlike, in controls and even some of the visual cues, the critical darling Journey. Just like that game, the basics of GRIS are enjoyable on their own – the developers deliver really fun simple movement with beautiful animations and responsive controls, so simply running and jumping around feels nice. And as the game progresses more simple mechanics are added, several of which enhance the joy of simply exploring the levels even further. Also just like Journey, the audio-visual aspect of the experience is one of the key elements of the game and it’s also wonderful. The game looks really nice on screenshots, but in motion all of the colours mix and move around the screen in a really beautiful way. All to enhance the simple but moving narrative about the dark place we might find ourselves in and overcoming that.
And if not for how wonderful this experience is, it would be far easier to get stuck on all the constant imperfections of the gameplay. How platforming might feel imprecise. How background and foreground elements on the screen aren’t as clearly defined as they would be in a game that focuses on more precise platforming. How some tasks/puzzles are less clearly defined than most of the others. How some sections are not clear on the navigation goals. How exploring and finding secrets is harder not because of how well hidden they are, but because of how the game often fails to establish the “intended” route, while forcing you to progress to the next part of the level with little warning.
All of that would be really annoying if this was a game about the mechanics, about exploration and platforming. But since it’s more about the narrative experience, the beautiful world and music, it’s rather easy to ignore the flaws. This game turned out to be more than what it looks like at first glance, even if perhaps less than what it could be. I very much enjoyed it and could easily recommend checking it out.