Sometimes, the absurdity of how most of us handle video game reviews is not lost on me. Imagine an art critic going to an art show and assigning each piece a review on a scale of 1-10. For one reason or another, that doesn’t happen. Perhaps there is an understanding that art is above silly number ratings and will speak to us all in different ways that will often correlate with our own life experiences. Perhaps it is protection from being the guy remembered centuries later for giving a Van Gogh or Michelangelo piece a 6.1/10. I don’t know. But there always feels like something a bit silly about handing out these number ratings to games that manage to transcend the medium and stand out as true art.
GRIS is one such game. When I made my “top 10 video games as art” list months ago, the main game everyone asked if I had played yet was GRIS. Sure enough, GRIS is an absolute artistic masterpiece. This game features some of the most gorgeous art in all of video games, with music that matches its level of beauty. This is a video game that showcases what an unbelievable medium this can be.
And yet, the centerpiece of being a video game is still interactivity. And GRIS isn’t always the best at those elements. This leads to an awkward conflict. GRIS can feel almost otherworldly at times. And at other times, it’s an incredibly basic puzzle platformer. How do you rate something like that?
Luckily, I am not an art critic. I am an amateur video game critic. We don’t take ourselves all that seriously. GRIS gets a damn number rating just like anything else! Even if it’s breathtaking! Even if it’s transcendent!
Transcendent Beauty
From the first moments of GRIS, you know that you are about to experience something special. The opening cutscene looks like a moving painting with vivid detail and striking colors, as a girl falls from a crumbling hand while sad and stunning music plays. Soon after, there is no color in the world, and through your adventure, you restore that color. It’s a way to explore themes of grief and loss in more abstract ways than your usual video game. The limited color palette can make screenshots of the game not seem as magnificent as they are in motion. But trust me when I say it all comes together in a fantastic way, especially once you add the spectacular music into the mix.
You also gain new platforming and navigation abilities symbolic of getting through grief as the game goes along. GRIS is a short game (about 4 hours), so there aren’t tons of them, but you get the ability to turn heavy, to swim, to double jump, and one other that I won’t spoil as the game goes along.
The way the game tackles this is interesting and beautiful, but I personally think that video games can be a tough medium to storytell in this way. If I were to simply watch a 30-minute movie with all these cutscenes, I might have picked up on what was really going on with this game earlier. But I was often so caught up in simply figuring out which way to go next, or how to get through the next puzzle, that I didn’t spend as much time thinking about the themes of the game. Weirdly, the achievement names were one of the main things that truly gave it away. I eventually figured it out, and it added an extra weight to some of the jawdropping cutscenes in the game. But I also felt a little sad that I missed some of that same impact early on. GRIS feels like a game designed to play twice. Once to experience the pure spectacle, and the second time to truly experience the story.
Unfortunately, as much as I enjoyed GRIS, it’s also a game I’m not eager to replay. The act of actually “playing” GRIS is often a mixed experience.
Oh, I Suppose This Is A Video Game Too
GRIS is a puzzle platformer that plays in the same way it tells its story. It wants to give you some tools and let you figure it out from there. Unfortunately, you spend quite a bit of the game with very basic tools, and the level of puzzle solving is just not on the level you would hope for. I had several sections in the first half of the game where I was legitimately bored as I tackled one extremely basic puzzle after another with just an ability to make myself heavy and a double jump. GRIS wants you to play with its mechanics to try and figure out its puzzles, but it only has a few somewhat interesting uses of these mechanics early on. After I figured out the trick that I needed to, there wasn’t much new added on to keep mixing things up. The platforming is also incredibly basic and not made to have any challenge. This is fine, but when the puzzles were boring, it didn’t help the experience much at all.
The easy puzzles also probably wouldn’t have annoyed me quite as much if GRIS was simpler to navigate. GRIS has areas with several branching paths (and no map). It also has confusing areas where sometimes you can pass through certain obstructions, and sometimes, they stop you. Combine that with the limited color palette, and at times, basic navigation was a bit annoying. Just figuring out where to go feels like the main puzzle in GRIS at times, and it’s not a puzzle that I particularly enjoy.
Luckily, the second half of the game features a few new abilities, and those are used in more interesting ways. It feels like in the second half of the game, every aspect of the game levels up in ways that had me much more engaged. The second half of the game has more “setpiece” type moments that add legitimate thrills to the gameplay that were missing early on as well. Navigation remains a bit of a pain sometimes, but it is manageable.
On the one hand, I love a good four hour game. I play so many long games that it’s fun to actually be able to complete a game in a few sittings. But I actually think GRIS would have benefitted greatly from being closer to the 6-8 hour range. The introductory gameplay feels like the kind of slow burn that a longer game would have. Except after you blink a few times, you are at the halfway point.
Art Critics Are Fucking Cowards. And I Ain’t No Coward.
Once again, though, GRIS is one of those rare games that I view as an “experience” as much as a video game. There are a few cutscenes and gameplay moments that I will carry with me for a long time to come. Yes, I had a few frustrations and dull spots along the way, but few video games have moments that left me breathless in the way this one did.
As I stated before, this all creates a very difficult situation. How do I rate something that at times bored me and at times had me close to shedding a manly tear from its pure beauty and wonder? I get why those spineless art critics avoid accountability by not giving out review scores.
While this is true for many games, I think with GRIS in particular, your mentality, your life experiences, and your mood could all vastly change how you experience it. Rating GRIS on a number scale seems truly tacky because it feels like it’s on a higher plane of existence than almost any other video game out there as art.
But also, I am not a coward. Thus, GRIS still gets a rating. Fight me.
Score: 8.0/10
Big Nerd Gaming 
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