The ostentatious Gris has got one thing going for it: A damn fine double-jump
Games Features What Are You Playing This Weekend?
I cannot say that I am entirely sold on Gris, the extremely art-directed game from the Spanish studio Nomada. Credit must be given for the boldness with which it stakes out its visual space, full of fluttering, seemingly hand-drawn animations and big washes of watercolor paint, all arrayed into a surprisingly large fantasy world that seems equally inspired by Moebius and, like, Thirty Seconds To Mars album art. It can be quite beautiful, but it insists upon this beauty, constantly pulling the camera out with a melodramatic swell of strings so you can gaze at yet another expanse of white and yellow and taupe ruins. It’s like an unusually good-looking person at a normal-person bar who is sort of demanding, through sheer extravagance of dress and volume of voice, that they be surrounded by courtiers and attendants and well-wishers the whole time. You want to both look at them and ask the bartender to kick them out.
All of which might seem a little harsh, but there’s a good game underneath all of this self-conscious beauty—a Metroid-lite exploration game, with elegant puzzles and an understated story of personal awakening. (Some of the game’s marketing foregrounds this story, but its actual execution isn’t cloying.) I quite liked some of these light puzzles, which begin at an almost subconscious, spatial level—“where exactly do I go?”—before turning into the more pointed “how the hell do I get that?” variety. It’s a Metroidvania without much backtracking, in other words, taking cues from Aquaria and Ori And The Blind Forest but treating their difficulty and mechanics as a sort of elemental thing, closer to Journey or Abzu.
Gris gets something else really right, too, from all of the games I mentioned: the importance of a sense of propulsion in a friction-free “art” game like this. Your nameless avatar—maybe her name is Gris, I am realizing now? whatever—runs at a finely animated jog, but all of her eventual power-ups prove to be gloriously tactile variations thereupon. The first of these—turning into a big-ass cube—seems to derail momentum, until you realize you can do it mid-air, from extraordinary heights, turning into an anvil that shatters the world’s crumbling stonework. The next of these—last one I’ll spoil—is written in the stars from the game’s outset: a double-jump, the most de rigeur upgrade in the entire Metroidvania pantheon, and yet one executed with loving precision and deceptive power, letting you blast skyward or float for miles to the earth. As with any good double-jump, you immediately find yourself using it constantly, for no reason, soaring happily through the rest of the game and leaping up never-ending staircases two awkward hops at a time. It’s proof positive of the sturdy, mechanical skill of Nomada’s small team; even if Gris is ultimately a misfire, they’ve got a good game in them somewhere.
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It reminds me of an Of Monsters And Men video…
“It’s like an unusually good-looking person at a normal-person bar who is sort of demanding, through sheer extravagance of dress and volume of voice, that they be surrounded by courtiers and attendants and well-wishers the whole time”This is how I feel about almost all of social media, “look at me you motherfuckers!” it seems to say ad nauseum
Twitter has a large wing that’s not that, but you have to push past all the “influencers” to find it.
So which game has the all-time most fun jumping mechanic? I’m going to say Saint’s Row 4.
“there’s a good game underneath all of this self-conscious beauty”“even if Gris is ultimately a misfire, they’ve got a good game in them somewhere”lulwot
Clayton Purdom is an anagram of “Lo! Pout! Cry ‘Damn!’”
I saw this on a gigantic screen at PAX this year and it looks quite nice and interesting. It looks like it releases today, for Switch, PC and Mac, if anyone else was curious about that bit.
So what’s the “misfire”? I admit I was interested in this for primarily stylistic reasons, and I was no where near expecting gameplay rigor at the level of a Hollow Knight or something. What this reminds me of the most is Knytt, a strange Metroid-lite with a distinct and beautiful retro style with no particular motivation aside from wanting to see what else there was in the world.
Rime, coincidentally another Spanish game, had a similar ‘IS THIS NOT THE MOST ACHINGLY BEAUTIFUL GODDAMN THING YOU’VE EVER EXPERIENCED’ heavy-handedness. It started to wear on me when I noticed that the score, despite aping Joe Hisaishi pretty hard, was never willing to be playful, silly, or weird like the less-majestic parts of an actual Hisaishi score. What it wanted to be was a Ghibli greatest hits playlist.I don’t want to write off this one without playing it, but it seems like that’s the sensibility of a lot of these beauty-core indie games. The teams have the technical skill to make games that sound and look like good serious art, but they stop there.
You seem to be confused about what you are trying to say about this game.
Has a bit of a Monument Valley vibe to it. Gotta say, I’m a sucker for this kind of aesthetic.
What Have You Finished This Week?Just putting this thread up for others who want to talk about their victories this week, because I haven’t finished a damn thing! I guess I managed to beat the first boss (Ruin) in Banner Saga 3, and in Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst I have almost “finished” catching up (on my PS4 copy) to where I got to in the PC/EA Origin copy before my laptop decided not to cooperate with the graphics anymore, but… other than that this week has been kind of a bust, both for gaming and everything else. Is it Christmas break yet?
I saw Gris pop up on Steam and I’m intrigued, but I’ve got more than enough backlog as is, and I’m trying to work up my determination to resist the HUGE BARGAINS coming in the holiday sale any day now…This weekend or next week, I expect to finish The Banner Saga 3, which I am enjoying pretty well so far. I still find the story a bit hard to follow for some reason (it’s not you, Banner Saga story, it’s me), but the setting and major events are as epic and engaging as ever. Stoic is continuing to mix up the combat in interesting ways. Most importantly, they now give you the ability to send in reinforcements in the multi-wave battles, rather than just dragging through with the same exhausted and dwindling crew as in the second game. So much better. Maybe I’ll check out “Survival Mode” (no story, just a looooong series of ever-tougher battles) a bit more in depth than I did on the second game.I’ll also be diving further into Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst. The story is pretty generic so far but I just love the parkour gameplay and the super-shiny utopian look. The video game equivalent of a popcorn action movie.I have started Blackwell Convergence but somehow it isn’t engaging me much so far. For one thing, this game puts you back to playing as Rosa, who is so much less interesting (so far?) than her aunt Lauren. Also, there’s something about the look and sound of this game which is failing to catch my interest in the same way as the other two. But I’ll keep at it— both of the previous games started a bit slow and eventually turned out to be pretty great.Happy gaming and have a great weekend, everyone!
Five hours later, I see I posted this to the wrong article. Oh well. Over to WHYFTW.
Gris has been getting mixed reviews, but I think i’m gonna go for it. The main complaint seems to be that it looks amazing and is easy, which come across as positives to me.