GRIS

GRIS is one of those releases that earns its reputation the hard way: through craft rather than content volume. Nomada Studio shipped a side-scrolling adventure platformer where the central character, a young girl named Gris, moves through a crumbling, desaturated world that slowly blooms back to color as she processes loss. There is no combat, no death screen, no fail state. What exists instead is a sequence of hand-animated environments, each built around a distinct emotional register, that you move through at a pace the game controls more than you do. The platforming mechanics are light but smartly tied to the narrative. Gris gains abilities over the course of her journey - a stone form that breaks through obstacles, a double jump that arrives at exactly the right emotional beat, a swimming ability that reframes entire sections of the map. None of these feel bolted on. Each ability changes how you read the spaces you have already passed through, and the game quietly encourages backtracking not through waypoints but through curiosity. The collectible mementos scattered across each world are never required, never graded, but finding them feels meaningful in a way that most optional collectibles do not. The visual direction from Conrad Roset is the obvious headline, and it earns every article written about it. The watercolor aesthetic is not just a skin over conventional pixel art - the animation work is frame-by-frame in places, and the environmental transitions are timed to the score in ways that make you stop walking just to watch. The music by Berlinist is one of the better game soundtracks of its release year: orchestral, restrained, with a choral arrangement that surfaces at key moments without telegraphing them cheaply. It is the kind of score that rewards headphones. The criticism that gets leveled at GRIS - and it is fair to surface it - is that the game leans hard into mood at the expense of mechanical depth. The platforming challenges are genuinely easy. Players looking for precision jumping, puzzle complexity, or systemic variety will find very little here. The runtime sits around three to four hours for a straight playthrough, six if you collect everything. Whether that feels thin or exactly right depends on what you bring to it. GRIS knows what it is, and it ends before it outstays its welcome, which is a discipline that larger productions rarely manage. This is a game for people who think about what games can do emotionally when they remove pressure and replace it with atmosphere. It is also for people who want to see what a small studio can accomplish when it focuses a single vision tightly enough. If you have ever played a game primarily for the feeling of being inside it, GRIS is made for you.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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