GRIS

PROS: Gameplay is pretty good. Visuals are off the charts sorts of good. Soundtrack is worth the buy, it's so damn peaceful and majestic. Very nice CONS: It's pretty bloody short. Didn't feel stretch in terms of runtime at all, but I felt it could've been a bit longer. There's no real story to it. No underlying themes or messages to be had here. You want to do the spoilery thing, you do the spoilery thing and that's it, it's a bit shallow honestly. Would recommend the buy, is good for wallpapers and the soundtrack. The rest is kinda ok.

Neat game, as for technical and design aspects. But it's a weird combination: - want to feel the game, through its ambiance? Nope, it's not a 2D walking sim. You'll have to deal with not easy platform sequences, which means it's definitly not casual gamers friendly. - want a splendid but challenging platform game? Nope, the moves are quite limited and the jump/double jump feel is "old school" and stiff. Compare it to Dead Cells or Celeste (difficulty appart), their moves sets are really enjoyable. Not in Gris. Here I felt like controlling a broom (before unlocking double jump), or an stiff umbrella (after unlocking the double jump). And you're not really in position to chose your way through the artsy level design, so good luck with chasing collectibles when paths are locked after you chose a direction (without you knowing you were at a crossroad). Totally subjectively, I prefer when a story is presented to me bit by bit. Not thrown to my face. Gris is like a shouting good looking kid: "HEY WATCH ME, I HAVE SOMETHING VEEEEEERY SAAAAAAD TO SHOW YOU!". Yeah, well, sorry, but Hollow Knight got me right here taking my hand and not saying a work. You damn Gris are nice looking but after finishing it, I can tell you I felt sometimes quite annoyed by you. Still 3 stars for the effort.

Unless you are after artsy presentation, the lack of fun factor becomes obvious quickly. This could have been an animated film, and nothing would be lost. Watch a play-through, because this is all style, and (nearly) no game.

As noted, this game does indeed have greats visuals, both the aesthetics and animations are solid and will probably still look great years later. The only negative on the visuals is that there is some repetition in the platform and room assets used, which was a bit dissapointing. Everything else unfortunately does not stack up. Music is adequate for the game, but nothing that you would have a burning desire to listen to afterwards. The game itself isn't that long, making the price tage a bit hard to justify but considering some of the negatives, maybe it's for the best it didn't overstay it's welcome. Though the game controls fine, the actual gameplay feels rather uninspired. It's not so much that the mechanics are too simple (they are) and more that the game does little with these mechanics. On top of that, the story itself is rather bland and obvious. If you relate to it in any way then maybe it works for you, however for myself I just didn't get pulled into it. Ultimately I would say I left this game feeling rather dissiapointed, especially after all the praise it's been getting. I get why for other people this works, but for me it just didn't click; there are other games that are definitely more visuals-over-gameplay in style that I like (such as NaissanceE) that I also would have trouble reccomending because it clicks with me for very specific reasons. Overall, 2/5 (2.5/5 is probably more accurate): if you are interested in this game, maybe wait for a sale or price drop, though even with that I'm not sure if I would fully reccomend it

GRIS is a jump-n-run game with nice, but minimal graphics that I found monotonuous in the long run. All environments look somehow similar. So similar that I had difficulty recognizing if I had been somewhere before. I did like the variations of timed jump puzzles with interesting physics like sidewards jumping out of a water basin through a membrane, inverted gravity, fading stairs, shape changing ledges and others. But apart from timed jump puzzles the game offers not much. I sorely missed a map or mapping feature. Given the huge size of the puzzle space and a constantly and automatically changing zoom level, I got lost pretty soon. And you will wander aimlessly around until you happen to arive at one of the goals. Also on the bad side are the fixed save points (console game), which causes the unavoidable repetition of long (boring) timed jump sequences in case of failure. There are also area's that become unreachable but still may contain unsolved (optional) puzzles, which I think is bad level design, since there is no map feature so you can not know when you arive at a critical choice point. You can also not go back to a previous save point, because there is only one, the last one, euphemistically called "automatic save feature". I would rather call it "automatic skip missed optional puzzles feature". Finally, there is the lack of a story. The game seems to be about grief, but the only grief I experienced was having spent too much time and money on this game. I played it on Linux using Wine (6.5) with no issues.