Gris

PC, Switch

Nomada Studio’s debut is absolutely in love with itself. It’s quintessential indie bait – a wordless, emotive story draped in soft, stunning visuals. Much of the game involves simply holding left and watching the watercolour world go by. As the tale unfolds, the background turns from a drab monochrome wasteland into a prismatic paradise filled with colour. Platforming is light and airy, and the puzzles more concerned with telling a story than setting a challenge. We’re even given an adorable forest sprite pet in the second level, for heavens’ sake. This is a game that knows its audience.

And that’s meant entirely as a compliment. Gris’ sense of its own self is striking, even if the means by which it strings it all together are often nothing revelatory. The visual style, naturally, has much to do with it. Artist Conrad Roset has achieved something special here, a spellbinding feat of interactive poetry and portraiture that – combined with lavish animation and sound design – makes for what must surely be one of the most beautiful games ever made.

The heroine’s dress, which gradually gains a variety of helpful abilities as you go, appears almost as a living thing. It flows behind her as she runs, flips playfully like a leaping dolphin or cresting wave on an about-turn, or unfurls itself into insect-like wings as you use your newfound float ability to clear a gap. The setting feels strangely familiar by now: the internal self presented as a kind of shattered wonderland, the pieces of which a manifestation of our heroine must walk on her path out of trauma. But what could have been an overly indulgent, maudlin representation of a troubled psyche is instead inked with all the shifting colour it deserves.

The first area is almost unrelentingly oppressive, however, a desert the colour of dried blood and past pain. And it’s a troubling start: we’ve made no secret of our aversion to strong winds in videogames, and Gris reaches straight for the tritest – and most irritating – metaphor for internal struggle. But it also hands you a solution without too much delay: you’re quickly able to transform your dress into a weighty cube around the heroine, which allows her to shuffle on regardless when a storm blows in. The faintly humorous sight of a cube grimly waddling onwards through adversity is unexpected enough that you’ll find yourself mollified – and later, the ability is repurposed in several creative ways, as you drop from heights to smash through breakable floors or prop up mechanisms.

Alongside a few surprises in other levels involving flash-frozen clones and magical lighting, playing as a pretty-headed cube is one of Gris’ few moments of mechanical whimsy and originality. Otherwise, it frequently cribs from other indie titles without adding much of value. Sliding down slopes through desert ruins early on is a basic homage to Journey, the long stretches minimally interactive and thus not half as expressive. Hopping across Cubist topiary starts out with a distinct air of Monument Valley 2 and swiftly becomes Super Mario’s jump-sensitive floors. Later, there are the inevitable sections in which gravity is reversed. By the time we’re singing to make flowers bloom, our eyes have just about rolled into an alternate realm. Sensibly, though, Gris never lingers too long on a single mechanic, rote or riveting as it may be. And for a game without dialogue that is rendered in such an abtruse manner, everything is taught with patience and grace: the art style is never counter to clarity and so frustrations are rare.

Happily, too, the painted world takes on more nuanced tones as it blooms, Roset deftly layering colour upon colour. A verdant forest is filled with the promise of growth and new life, little creatures chattering among the leaves – but its energy also gives rise to a dangerous new facet of the self. And even though the expanse of blue you’re plunged into afterwards is seemingly never-ending, under the cerulean stratum of caverns and oceans and ice still glow the hues of previous levels, past experiences. If there’s a prettier visual representation of depression in a videogame, it’s difficult to recall. The blue level is a suffocating, ever-changing dive in the silent dark. You adapt, and survive. Sometimes you even feel at home in there, leaping from water to air and back again effortlessly as your abilities begin to flow together elegantly. But things lapse into cliché once again when your black dog – or bird, or eel – turns up to chase you in a largely toothless set-piece. It’s at these points where one starts to see through the pretty but thin veneer of watercolour: when even the enemy is gorgeous, there’s a worrying sense that we’re only seeing the Instagrammable side of sadness here.

Still, we can’t deny the genuine nausea at the sudden reminder that we haven’t fully escaped the clutches of darkness, nor the bittersweet, familiar sensation of seeing that blue tinge the remainder of the game. Yes, the ghost of a tear appears when a part of ourselves we’d just put so much work into piecing together turns up to defend us. And the ending lands, its message cementing Gris as part of a new wave of games talking to a generation so disillusioned that illusion has become a viable way out, where being self-absorbed is the first step towards practising the same compassionate gaze on the world outside.

Interminable at times, obviously. But – however begrudgingly – you have to admit it’s got a point. Calling Gris’ well-worn touchstones mere cliché seems unfair: ‘cliché’ implies they’ve lost all resonance, and that isn’t true here. Yes, perhaps Gris is a little bit in love with itself. Maybe we should take the hint.

There’s a worrying sense we’re only seeing the Instagrammable side of sadness