Gris

GRIS is a more a piece of art than a game, Its visuals and music are like a painting coming to life. That alone is enough for you to feast your senses on. Gameplay is minimal, you do have platforming and minor puzzles but it is the strict minimum, just to move the story forward. Speaking of which the story, it is very moving and takes you through the stages of grief that the developer went through when losing their mom, with each stage representing the internal emotions visually on screen. It's hard not to be touched by it, and in that sense it is quite unique and memorable.

This is a solid 9/10 game for me. The storytelling is poignant, and Berlinist did a fantastic job with the music. If you like immersing yourself in a world that shows you its story, this is a great game for you. My only complaints are the following: 1. No sprint?: The pacing of the game works wonderfully for a first time playthrough, but when you replay parts of the game looking for secrets you missed during your first go, the game can feel very slow. The whole game, I was holding my breath for a running ability (which I thought we would unlock after beating the game once) to allow for faster replays of earlier chapters, but I was sorely mistaken. This leads me to my second point... 2. Unintuitive secrets MOST OF THE TIME, I loved the way the game communicated with you. Subtle hints for those who ventured off the beaten path, small yet noticeable animations for possible interactions with objects... but I felt at times that some secrets in this game feel very... unintuive, for lack of better word. For example, when going for that Inuiki statues achievement, I couldn't help but think that the game could have made it a LOT clearer that there was a point in destroying them. The Magic Fowls give you that lovely jingle when interacting with them, and I felt like the other secrets in this game should have also given you an unmistakable sound / cue that you were progressing towards *something*. As an additional example, during my first go at level Three, I fed our little friend almost all of the apples (I had missed a single one). After having done all that, and nothing happened, I simply assumed that there was no point in feeding it, aside from simply wanting to. Imagine my surprise when I checked the achievements for this game, and I saw that there was an achievement for it! A jingle, maybe one that goes up in pitch as you progress more through finding secrets, would be a great way of letting the player know that they're on track to "completing" a secret in the game. On that note, I also really would have appreciated some way of tracking my progress when collecting stars / mementos / secrets in the game. The menu would have been a great place to have a tracker of some sort, letting you know at what checkpoint of a level you are, and if you missed something. If you couldn't tell already, I have collector's anxiety, so I feel a strong urge to find all the secrets in a game, to experience it to the fullest degree possible. Upon completing areas, I was bummed to find out I had missed secrets, and even more disappointed when seeing that I could not backtrack. (Of course, this is somewhat remedied by the chapters system, but it still implies a lot of redundancy). Now that I think about it, maybe things would have been easier if the player was faster, or if we had some control of the camera to look around, or even some in-game way of knowing if we fully "cleared" an area and found all of its secrets! These were my nitpicks for a fantastic story-driven game! Once again, I had a lot of fun with it and I simply wish that replayability was made a little more convenient for the player :) Great work on the story, the visuals, the animation, and the music! This was a very immersive game that took me around 4 hours to complete.

If a video game belongs to a museum, this would be the game! The art style is stunning along side the breathtaking music it has. You can literally forget that you are playing a video game and find yourself lost in its world. Gameplay was nothing really crazy is going on but the top class level designs and puzzles makes up for it. You should def play it!