Gris Metacritic Mobile Review
By Admin 3 years ago
Gris is a visual masterwork. It’s a live watercolor design that discovers the composite themes of loss and sorrow through a visually eye-catching world and heartwarming orchestral score.
At initial glance, Gris looks to be an appropriate bookend to a year that initiated with Celeste - a game that married a journeying of mental illness with implausible platforming gameplay, but eventually, its basic level design and many slight frustrations make its outstanding qualities feel only skin deep.
Gris PS4 Review
Gris’s story can be imperceptive at times as it chooses to convey it through representation rather than dialogue. The chief character, a brokenhearted young woman, has lost her voice and strolls the vacant, motley world with no real sense of reason.
As she discovers and the landscape varies from windswept deserts littered with garbage and distorted buildings to forests and underwater labyrinths that conceal inquisitive creatures both friend and enemy, she learns new skills to surmount obstacles and ultimately find her way “out”. Like a painting in an art gallery or an art-house film, Gris leaves itself open to understanding.
Serene piano tracks delegate into passionate dirges. In one stage, a powerful red wind rocks your character as you thrust across a red desert. The only caution you get is when the music initiates to change, growing darker and more threatening.
Music in Gris
As the music increases, the gales turn the entire screen a dark crimson. As the music collapses, the wind recedes.
The animation, world design, and visual effects in Gris are at once striking and absorbing. There’s a spotlight on symmetry and easy, clean design. The character is hand-animated and her transformations into dissimilar forms show a mastery of 2D animation.
Her cloak, for example, twists around her body as it spreads into the form of a manta-ray, flowing and pulsing as you swim deeper into the dark, menacing depths of underwater areas.
Gris Mobile Game Review
As you shift through the diverse stages, blotches of watercolor extend across the screen, painting the gray world. The orchestral score balances these transformations in mood, and the first time I guided the unidentified protagonist off a cliff framed against a completely symmetrical sun, it took my breath away.
There’s also not much of a motive to replay Gris. I would've loved the capability to return to former stages with new abilities just to move through them with more choices, but after each stage is finished it’s blocked off and available only from the chapter menu screen.
When you go back to a location, you’re stripped of any new abilities, making replaying stages just that – everything is reset apart from collectible mementos.
Every stage has a set number of these collectibles that, when finished, unbolt a reward. But the only way to track them is by distorting to the start of each level and finding which exact part of a chapter hid the uncollected few I required wasn’t clear.
Gris Nintendo Switch Review
The bigger issue that appeared over time is that Gris’s platforming and puzzles are overly easy. Its stages are linear to a fault, even when they give you the alternative to discover in any direction, and the only times I got trapped were due to visual design inconsistencies.
Unfussiness isn't itself a bad thing, especially when done gracefully, but in Gris’s case, it makes exploring the vast landscapes dull and recurring.
Gris is, at times, a thoughtful, affecting discovery of compound emotions that uses its levels as a canvas for some of the most stunning visual design in any platformer, backed by an incredible score.
At others, it’s an irritatingly easy and confusing game that lets its creative ambitions run roughshod over its gameplay.
