Review / GRIS: a magnificent and melancholy introspective journey
PCPS4 / PS5SwitchXbox Series X|S
Lore
The minimalist nature of the environment allows our eye to pay close attention to all the details to be found here and there in the chapters we pass through.
Game
Our protagonist moves through a two-dimensional world where life takes over as our adventures unfold. GRIS is a simple platformer with basic but beautifully realized gameplay. Our character will unlock abilities during his adventure, and these will enable us to advance in the face of the challenges we encounter.
We’re not talking about magical powers, but rather pictorial ways of expressing the qualities and emotions our heroine will need to demonstrate. GRIS is not a speed game, nor is it an experiment that will require superhuman skills or a lot of training to complete. It’s a medium that can be used to tell a story, make us feel emotions and make us think about a complex subject in a playful way.
The developers have thought of just about everything in order to captivate us, and it’s undoubtedly these little details that make all the difference. In GRIS, there is no life gauge. You can’t die, you can only repeat a failed jump, but no failure is final. It’s a game mode that corresponds to the pilgrimage we’re making and the message the game wishes to convey.
GRIS has a style all its own, but if we had to compare it to other monuments of our “pop culture”, I’d venture to say that it’s a magnificent blend of several works that have also left their mark on us through their history and artistic direction: Studio Ghibli, Ori and the Blind Forest, Ico and Journey.
These powerful stories help us understand our emotions by sharing the stories of people like you and me.
Atmosphere
Lifetime
Verdict
Les points positifs
- Visually captivating
- A magnificent musical ambience
- Simple, perfect gameplay
Les points négatifs
En résumé
GRIS offers us an experience in which the gameplay perfectly accompanies the story it wishes to tell us, even though no words are spoken. We lose ourselves in a picturesque universe, familiar and foreign at the same time. It's a story to be discovered slowly, so that we can appreciate the work done by the developers to make us experience these emotions that are in fact our own.