GRIS
Or, "an exceptionally beautiful exploration into grief and finding the strength to keep going" and also "a very clever puzzle game."
Overall Score
This game filled me with delight and wonder, made me feel a range of emotions, and gave me a way to process grief and loss through gorgeous art, a moving story, and thoughtful mechanics.
Image description: a watercolor-style illustration of a young white woman with short blue hair, in profile. She holds her hands up towards her face with her eyes closed and mouth open—singing or crying, she has an air of grief and deep emotion.
Lightning Round Questions
What series of emojis best represents this game?
🎶🌬🌊🌿🌸🦚✨
What phrases did I say a lot while playing this game?
*quiet gasp of delight and wonder*
“I’m stuck.”
“Just kidding, I’m not stuck!”
“Oh wow, that’s so clever!!”
What sparked joy?
Every single frame of this game is ART. I could frame every screenshot and hang it on my wall. And the music!!
There’s such a clear and compelling narrative and it’s told with basically no words.
I have SO MANY EMOTIONS playing this game.
You don’t get hurt and you don’t die!! It’s not stressful!! I love it!!
The way you learn new ways to interact with the game is amazing—I felt so much delight.
Progressing required just the right amount of challenge to be interesting but not frustrating.
What did not spark joy?
The game is pretty short—it only took me a few sessions to complete the narrative.
Every now and again, I really wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do next. There’s not much explicit guidance. But I think that’s also part of what makes the game so good?
Will I keep playing this game in the future?
If I do, it won’t be immediately. The narrative feels very complete and satisfied for me, and part of the joy of this game was being surprised by every phase. I’d want to wait a while to forget some of the specifics before playing again, to try to recreate some of that feeling.
I think the game does have some extra challenges that I didn’t complete the first time around. I could see playing another round in the future where I try to complete everything and just take my time appreciating the art and the music (SO GOOD) again.
What kind of friend would I buy this game for?
Definitely anyone who loves beautiful art or puzzles. I think this game, being on the shorter side, would be really accessible to other people who are relatively new gamers. But even really experienced gamers could appreciate the gorgeous illustrations and the moving story! So… basically everyone. I would recommend it to everyone.
The Review, In Full
I found GRIS on my own. I am very proud of this fact, and I love to repeat it to my husband and remind him I found this game, this is my game. I knew about it before he did and that means the score is now Marie: 1, Husband: Infinity - 1.
Anyway, I was scrolling through the Nintendo Store trying to find something I might like and this one caught my eye. I looked up a review and immediately knew: I had to play this game.
And I absolutely loved it.
GRIS is this fantastical, emotional journey with stunning art and a moving story. It’s about grief and loss and mourning and closure. It’s about feelings. It makes me have so many feelings.
The game begins in an empty world in shades of gray. The only control you have lets you move your character (a young woman with a large gray cloak) forward—and it’s such a slow trudging forward that you feel exhausted yourself. If you have ever felt the deep kind of grief where even standing feels nearly impossible, you recognize it immediately.
Image description: a black-and-white scene cut horizontally into two parts. The top features giant stone jars and statues of women sitting on the floor and crying with their faces covered. The statues are all in various states of brokenness, with large cracks and chunks of stone missing. A young woman stands in the middle. The bottom half is a blank white screen, with the shadow of the young woman cast below, surrounded by shadows of birds.
As you continue exploring the world, you find melancholy scenes full of broken statues of women crying and crumbling stone buildings in disrepair. Everything around you reflects the kind of shattering you feel when faced with a deep loss. Nothing escapes destruction, nothing is unchanged.
But as you progress in the game, colors come back into the world one by one and you learn new ways of moving and exploring. You do not remain stuck in the deepest part of the grief; there is some hope to be found here.
Image description: a scene in shades of red. A hot air balloon with geometric designs is attached to a metal platform on a floating red rock. Other rocks float to the left, and to the right are a crumbling stone tower and an intricate metal platform with multiple levels. Clouds, also red, linger in the background.
I won’t tell you much more of the story; part of the utter joy of this game is the way each phase reveals itself to you, in its own time. I will say that I found the ending incredibly moving, to the point that I simply sat staring into space and crying while the credits rolled. I convinced my husband to play this game too, and we actually had different interpretations of what it meant. If you have played the game, or play it in the future, I’d love to hear your take—but I won’t share mine until you promise you’ve played it through.
Video description: the young woman is in a forest scene with square trees (green leaves with red trunks) surround a crumbling stone tower. The young woman jumps from tree to tree to tower to tree, as some of the trees change shape. There is quiet pondering music in the background, but mostly what you hear are the calls of birds and the shuffle of the woman’s cloak as she jumps and lands.
I cannot tell you enough times how gorgeous this game is. Every single frame, absolutely every single one, is a painting. I was in constant wonder as I explored the different levels. As each new color was added back to the world, I was captivated by the details they brought forth and the way the same scene could be utterly transformed.
And the music! The sound! I had previously teased my husband for playing his games with the volume up so loud, and asked him couldn’t he just play in silent mode so I wouldn’t be disturbed? He then proceeded to inform me that sound design is an integral part of the storytelling experience and a bunch of other stuff I kind of tuned out.
So imagine how much he teased me in return when I was playing this game and saying things like “where are my headphones, I need to immerse myself in this visual soundscape” completely unironically. But I meant it! The way the music changed throughout the game; the way background noises enhanced each scene; the sounds your character made as she moved throughout each platform; all of these details made a completely mesmerizing and emotional experience!
Image description: the young woman stands in an ice cavern. Large rectangular icicles hang from the ceiling, and two broken stone jars are held in the air from a round metal chandelier. Everything is blue and cold.
The actual gameplay itself was wonderful too. One of my favorite parts: you can’t die and you don’t get hurt. If you fall off a platform, you simply start over. You aren’t unduly punished and there’s not much external pressure. You simply work on each piece of the puzzle until you progress. Sometimes that means figuring out a new way of moving and sometimes it’s skill-based and comes to precise jumping or timing.
Multiple times, I would reach a part of the game that stymied me. I would work on the same part over and over again. Usually, just at the time I started to complain to my husband that I was stuck, I would have a breakthrough. It was just the perfect level of difficulty for me; enough that I felt challenged and invested, but not so much that I felt defeated.
The game felt clever; I felt clever; I had a sense that I really was learning and exploring and growing along with my character and the world.
(Side note: I have heard this is how other people feel about Celeste, but I found that game way too challenging for me, and I couldn’t find the right balance with the assist mode controls, but that’s a story for another review.)
Image description: a scene of some kind of garden in blues and greens and yellows. Large stone towers and columns—not crumbling or broken—stand tall on a platform. Giant vases features large flowers and plants, while vines and ferns spill over the walkway abundantly.
Sometimes the lack of clear guidance or direction frustrated me. I wasn’t sure what to do next. There’s not really many words in the game—you just keep moving until you’re either stuck or unstuck.
I am fairly certain there were a bunch of optional challenges I didn’t complete; I still don’t really understand what they were or how to finish them, but the game’s main menu showed some of the progress. I might eventually try to figure that bit out, but I don’t feel anything lacking from not understanding it.
But overall, I don’t mind the vagueness of this game. I think it fits the subject well; just like when processing loss, it’s not always obvious what you should be doing. You just take it one step at a time, until you look around and realize quite how far you’ve come from the early days.
Image description: a stunning sky in reds and orange and purple, with some kind of large star in the foreground, fades to a darker color. There is a stone platform with ferns and leaves and flowering plants spilling over the edges in greens and pinks. A tear-shaped green tree grows on the far side.
I love this game. I just absolutely love it.
Sometimes we need art to allow us to explore our own emotions in a way that feels safer, less immediate, more abstract.
These days, I am having a hard time crying about the things in my life about which I am the saddest or most afraid; I think if I start, I might not be able to stop. But every time I think about Uncle Iroh singing Leaves from the Vine in Avatar: The Last Airbender, I start sobbing, just absolutely sobbing.
If you are having a hard time feeling grief or loss right now; if you are afraid or feeling powerless; if you need an escape that isn’t numbing out but gives you space to feel through art and music and your own sense of agency… if any of this resonates with you, I recommend you play GRIS. And know that I am thinking of you, and sending you much warmth and color.
GRIS costs $16.99 and was released in 2018 by Nomada Studio for the Nintendo Switch.