If beauty does not save the world, then perhaps it will save video games. So, in any case, I want to think after meeting with Gris, the debut project of the Spanish Nomada Studio. Personally, I find it difficult to remain objective and restrain emotions, so I’ll start right away with the author’s solely subjective statement: after Gris left, there’s a long-running dispute over whether games can be art, I suggest to consider it closed. Yes, they can - Nomada employees prove.

Art Gallery

From our video preview you already know that this is the most beautiful game in the world. Or rather, this way: immensely beautiful creations were before (remember at least Child of Light), but in Gris this beauty of watercolor paints, fine lines, as well as games with color and panorama are closest to what can be called just art - as if we we see a collection of pictures of some watercolor imagist artists who hung in the Paris gallery a week ago and now come to life on our screens. In this sense, it can only be compared in part with 11-11: Memories Retold.

It's useless to paint for a long time - you can see everything perfectly without me both on the trailers and on the wonderful preview of Katerina Krasnopolskaya. And hear. Magic piano play and in general very expressive, point-changing music in Gris has the same meaning as the visual range. They work perfectly in pairs, complementing each other to immerse us — no, not in a trance, but in the atmosphere of a dramatic, almost tragic (but with the right to hope) journey of a girl who has lost her voice, through the ruins of her own universe.

Sad journey

The message about the naive girl, “locked in her own world because of the pain that has enveloped her in reality,” you yourself will read in the description on Steam. But there is little specifics in it. And it is precisely this uncertainty (especially at first) of the history of Gris that someone might want to rebuke the authors.

All ingenious is simple?

The girl sings on a huge stone hand, then suddenly loses her voice, the statue of an unknown woman collapses, the girl falls down, gets up and slowly walks along the monochrome, faded earth. The shoulders are lowered, it cannot run, and when we press the space bar in expectation that it at least jumps, it, on the contrary, falls to the ground. Strong, emotional, conceptual? Yes. The mood of grief is immediately created - you understand that in this game, not just once or twice goose bumps will run over your skin.

But what next? A lonely sad girl in a triangular dress runs along deadly beautiful and conceptually built, but lifeless locations, rolls down the hills for a long time and falls lower and lower. What is it? Variation on the Journey?

Mood Color

Partly yes, but then a more classic platformer begins, in which, if desired, you can also find references to other games. The girl jumps, solves riddles and gains new abilities. Here is her dress turns into a cobblestone - so you can hide from the gusts of an unknown storm or break fragile ceilings in a jump. Here she learns to fly high in the sky, bouncing, like on a springboard, on red butterflies. Already briskly floating in the water, here with the help of yellow butterflies illuminates the darkness, pulling out the outlines of walls, columns, stairs and platforms from the blackness.

Finally, she finds a voice and sings so that the flowers open and all the same butterflies fly out from there - well, or to jump higher on their petals. In general, nothing complicated, although closer to the final situation is heating up in all senses and sometimes it becomes difficult to understand what they want from you.

And the main goal is to collect white spheres, with the help of which the heroine somewhere activates, crosses abysses or unlocks altars with new abilities. In addition, it is these areas that are needed in order to build a star bridge in the sky, along which the girl is going to go back upstairs to the stone female hand, from where she fell. As you go through this huge sculpture is gradually restored.

Isn't it an art?

Locations at the same time change, finding color - red, green, blue, yellow. Each of them gives its own abilities, environment, tasks and atmosphere. In this sense, Gris is full of fantasy and diversity. Races in the middle of green trees are replaced by flights in the sky or swims in the blue waters, and then we run in the bleak darkness, where Limbo is immediately remembered.

Repetition in its own way

Of course, we have already seen a lot of things - there is the creation of our own “clones” (in this case with the help of freezing), and exercises with gravity, and swimming in water. But who said this is bad? Gris in this case resembles a collection of ideas filed with its own atmosphere and style.

In any case, everything is beautiful, conceptual and surreal. So much so that at some point the world turns upside down - in the literal sense of the word: we run headfirst. And everything reminds some kind of a fairy tale. The girl, who is clearly in trouble, is assisted by fireflies, small whether robots, or stones on the legs, which she feeds with apples, big turtles. And trying to prevent a huge black swallow, which then turns into a black moray eel.

Art metaphors

However, here again, the question may arise: why all these surreal platform exercises and puzzles? But do works of art necessarily have to chew everything and put it on the shelves? But to leave hints and symbols, metaphors, forcing us to think and think out, to interpret, completely.

And in Gris, in fact, these hints are enough. The girl, who, as we already understood at the very beginning and know from the description, has locked herself in her own world because of the grief that has befallen her, returns the whole game to the monochrome world, searches for the way upstairs, home, and tries to assemble that destroyed female stone figure by fragments with which she fell. In addition, the sculptures of this woman now and then found in different locations. What else is needed to understand what it is about?

In any case, I want to interpret, and this is already good. For me, this is a story about how a girl tries to collect herself by fragments, her desire to live on, by accepting and releasing what has happened. In a broader sense, the metaphor of resurrection and overcoming. Another question is that all these metaphors and symbols are not concentrated in the watch “walking simulator”, but spread over a three-hour puzzle-platform game.

Personally, I had no problems with it. I treated what is happening as viewing a smart copyright movie, when you sit, try to understand what is happening, interpret, distract yourself for something, but still wait for a denouement. And in the end you get such a catharsis, which turns everything around and makes you feel like an old sentimental idiot, who, swallowing tears, stares at the final credits for a long time.

Like any work of art, Gris is trying to evoke emotional, even spiritual, if you will, response from the public with the help of expressive forms. I - caused. The last time I experienced such emotions from the game, perhaps, only in the finale of the first season of The Walking Dead. Well, maybe in Life is Strange. In the same Steam almost all reviews are also designed in the style of "tears and snot." But these are extremely bright emotions. In this sense, Gris can be recommended as an art therapy for people who are depressed. She proves that in any situation you can gather yourself, stand up, overcome and go further - even with tears in your eyes ...