WARNING: This review is less an actual review and more of a rambling mess...

For a game that’s hailed as this incredible work of art within video games, this game feels like it desperately wants to be a short film about depression and grief by using its colors and imagery to say something about the topic, but since it was a game, they had to put some sort of tangible roadblock for the player to get through.

Speaking of roadblock, ludonarrative dissonance reigns supreme over its gameplay! The game always tries to show you how grief and depression is a difficult thing to get through in life in the form of a shadow monster, but any genuine impact those moments could’ve had is destroyed by the fact the game in general is way too easy, there is (almost) not a single moment in Gris where the game challenges you, which may sound like a nitpick, but then look at games like Celeste and Abe’s Oddysee, where their challenging gameplay that require precise inputs through individual rooms really accentuate the anxiety that Madeline feels about climbing up the mountain or the oppressive industrial hellscape and bewilderingly alien and hostile biomes Abe must endure to save his kin, and I use those games as point of comparison since Gris is a platformer in a similar vein to Limbo, also focusing its “challenges” in individual rooms, but when most of them are so easy to solve with nothing else to give it an edge that really shows depression as this monster that can ruin your life for many years, in practice its tangible delivery ends up not being felt as strongly as the developers thought it would.

I’m not going to cover the message itself since I lack experience in the area, but it also lacks in the intangible delivery of its message, by taking itself too seriously and in the end feeling inhuman, in comparison to a Celeste or Chicory: A Colorful Tale, where as those games still have enough levity for their message to still be effective and feel more like coming from the experience of whoever created those games, Gris feels less like those games and more like… Hatred, you know? That poor man’s Postal, the latter which was purposefully made to be very offensive while trying to take the idea of violence in video games as far as they could possibly go (at least for the time), and then some edgy teenager who loves shit like De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas and Alex Proyas’s movies for their edgy aesthetics and lyrics tried to do a spiritual successor to Postal? While not as egregious, Gris kind of leaves a feeling similar to it, except replace those things with Tumblr and Steven Universe and you’ll get the drill.

This also harkens back to how uncreative Gris’s gameplay is, and consequently drags down the sights and sounds. While the game’s visuals and sounds are a delight to hear and see, the game is very much not a case of those things further enhancing its gameplay, but instead one where all the spotlights are focused on it and the gameplay is thrown into the sidelines. That’s the one thing I hate the most about “art games”, taking away what makes the medium so special while trying to legitimize itself as a art form by using techniques found in paintings or cinema as a crutch to appease Roger Ebert's ghost, still haunting the medium with the “games as art” nonsense to this day, while misunderstanding the appeal of games like Journey and Yume Nikki, games that were deeply rooted in subtracting actions from the player in favor of a more minimalistic experience, but they didn’t just ditch gameplay altogether, did they? Never does Gris do anything more interesting with the medium or challenging what and how a game should be, like redefining how a game is structured or how a player fundamentally traverses levels or even how controls in a genre like platformers should be (see also: Cruelty Squad, Sayonara Wild Hearts, Yoku’s Island Express), which I'd be fine with that, games can be excellent without needing to do all that shit I mentioned above, but Gris pretends like it is much bolder and smarter than what it really is, and in the end is just pretentious. Again, the sights and sounds are incredible, but when the gameplay is as lacking as it is here, they end up not having the same long-lasting appeal that a Hyper Light Drifter has, if anything the game is closer to Earthworm Jim, in presentation it looks great, but it isn’t enough to carry out mediocre gameplay that could have been much better.

And the thing is, there are a lot of things here that, had the team focused on a even balance of gameplay and everything else instead of one over the other, still taking cues from Journey but also adding some Abe’s Oddysee (or Limbo for that matter) spice to make it a far better game than it ended up being, and it seems Neva, Nomada Studio’s next game, is taking the groundwork of Gris and doing something bigger (badder) and better. As for this one though? It didn’t end in a home run…

Lesson of the day: Killing hordes of demons in Hell while listening to Slayer-esque heavy metal songs is a real work of art! The Master of Puppets of gaming even!