Gris (2018, Nintendo Switch) Review

A GIRL STRUGGLING TO LIVE

Also for: Android, iPad, iPhone, Macintosh, Playstation 4, Windows

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Dealing with mental illness is a deeply personal experience, which may explain why I find Gris, the debut title from Barcelona-based studio Nomada, to get it as wrong as humanly possible. A game about grief steeped in serenity and beauty feels immature and, ultimately, dishonest. If Nomada set out to portray a mild episode of feeling pleasantly sad, then perhaps Gris succeeds—but its stark imagery gestures toward something far heavier, such as depression or the loss of someone close.

Nomada enlisted Spanish artist Conrad Roset, known for his stylized depictions of the female figure, to shape both Gris and her world. Art is, of course, subjective, and I have no interest in questioning Roset’s technical skill. His illustrations are gentle and soothing, but the motifs leave me emotionally unmoved. I’ve reached an age where the melancholy of an angsty teenage mindset no longer resonates with me at all.

What I do object to is how this aesthetic is used to depict grief—an experience that, in reality, is as stressful, dark, and ugly as human emotion can be. As an exploration of mental illness, the psychological horror of Silent Hill 2 feels far more sincere. At the very least, it operates at the correct end of the emotional spectrum. Gris, by contrast, misses the mark entirely. Nothing about mental illness is pretty, and by presenting it as such, the game feels overly neat, distanced, and philosophically sanitized—as if it were finding beauty in someone else’s torment. It flirts with the romanticized idea that suffering is beautiful because life is suffering. Anyone who believes that simply hasn’t suffered enough.

That said, Gris undeniably possesses a high level of aesthetic polish. The music is calming, if occasionally too on-the-nose, and the artwork’s clean shapes make the environments easy to parse. At times, watercolor-like ink bleeds across the screen to simulate weather and motion, giving the impression that the art itself responds to emotional shifts alongside your actions.

Mechanically, the game is easy to follow. The visuals support navigation, the controls are responsive, and the platforming puzzles occasionally show real ingenuity. But Gris does not exist as a mechanical exercise alone. Its theme functions almost like an internal gameplay system—one that takes place entirely in the player’s mind and cannot be ignored. If that thematic layer fails to resonate, the act of simply wandering the world begins to feel hollow.

You control Gris, a blue-haired girl exploring a two-dimensional universe. She is depicted as a human head atop a black-veiled body with spindly limbs—possibly the soul of a giant statue she once animated through song. At the start of the game, she loses her voice, causing the statue to crumble and collapse. Gris, left stranded in its palm, falls to the ground far below.

From there, your task is to guide her through an audiovisual journey centered on rebuilding the statue. Along the way, you collect guiding lights and assemble them at key locations to bridge a path skyward. It is a metaphor-heavy experience, ostensibly open to interpretation. In practice, however, the imagery is often so explicit that it resists alternative readings unless one fixates on minor symbolic details—which, given the emotional focus, I find uninteresting.

The world begins in muted greys, gradually unlocking new colors as you progress. Desolate crimson deserts give way to lush greenery, followed by crystal-blue lakes formed from the statue’s tears. The camera frequently pulls back to reveal environments so vast that Gris herself nearly disappears within them. Some images linger in memory—a massive sea creature looming in the distance before you descend into a pitch-black cave. In moments like this, and perhaps one or two others, Gris comes closest to emotional sincerity.

As new mechanics are introduced, Gris gains the ability to glide, dive, and eventually transform into a heavy stone block, allowing her to withstand storms and smash through barriers. In its strongest sections, the game combines these abilities into clever environmental puzzles. They slow progress without ever truly challenging it.

I’ll grant Nomada this: the game is earnest in its intent. Gris invites replay, encouraging players to project new interpretations onto its imagery. In that sense, it does succeed as an art object. But it does nothing for me. I find it dispiriting to see such a serious subject filtered through what feels like the pandering introspection of a moody mind. I’ve encountered this approach before in video games, and I suspect I will again—as long as such works continue to be praised uncritically.

I understand that Gris means well. It is melancholic and openly asks for your empathy. Still, it rests on a foundation of long-standing misconceptions about mental illness. I, too, was once a brooding teenager; I recognize the impulse. But the version of myself who believed the world revolved around my inner turmoil no longer exists. Real anguish is not gentle. It makes you irritable, exhausting, and unreachable. While beauty may still exist in the world around you, it becomes inaccessible to a mind trapped in relentless memory and fatigue.

Gris conveys none of that—emotionally or experientially. Nor does it seem interested in trying. Instead, it feels self-absorbed, pristine, and overly philosophical. Like someone taking a restorative solo walk through nature and suddenly deciding to meditate on grief and depression without having lived through them. The game plays it far too safe, and as a result, I can draw nothing meaningful from its conclusions—because I simply do not trust them.