PERSONAL

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GRIS

5 years ago - Edited 5 years ago1,187 words

I played an indie game! It's called Gris, and it's a beautiful, abstract 2D platformer, which I both greatly admire and envy, in a way.

One of my goals this year is to play more indie games, which I've been avoiding doing for a while because they're the competition and I compare my work to them and feel bad when they're successful and mine's not. "Is this what people want? It's different to what I'm making. Why should I even bother?" That kind of thing.

It's annoying, since games have provided some of my most cherished experiences, and I'm missing out on creating more of those by avoiding games. Plus I'm stuck being inspired by games I played years ago rather than what's being newly produced.

Last year, a few of you suggested a bunch of indie games I could play, and I started making a list. I'd been meaning to work my way through that list (starting with Undertale...), but someone mentioned a game in a comment on the previous post, so on a whim I thought I'd start with that. It's called GRIS (for reasons that elude me). I vaguely recognised it from when I was uploading Sindrel Song to Steam - the example box art Steam provided to developers behind the scenes was for this game - but had no idea what it was. I gave it a go anyway.



You might have already played it; the amount of reviews is very high, so I'm assuming the number of sales and players is much higher.

It's an arty, beautiful platformer that was recommended to me as being free of danger, an experience more than a challenge, which I can say is a good way of describing it. I finished it in 3 hours, and I consider those hours well spent.



The art is phenomenal; it's the kind of game where every screenshot is a work of art in itself (I wish I'd taken more, though the thought only occurred to me half way through). I love the abstract shapes which blend geometric precision with organic vitality. It gives the world the sugary appeal of simple icons while still allowing it to feel fully alive.

A thought I had while playing it was that different games engage different parts of us. Some engage the Body, challenging reflexes, endurance, skill. Others engage the Mind, with their stories and lore that keep you thinking; I'd consider my own work in that category. A few, like this one, engage the Spirit; they're not a tough challenge, and I certainly found my own mind wandering throughout as it wasn't particularly engaged, but they manage to touch something deeper, more mystical; playing them feels more like meditation than anything.



It reminded me of other games with a similar "arty, spiritual" feel, all of which I love and which were successful. Journey, Monument Valley, and Ori and the Blind Forest come to mind, as do the games by Nifflas (was that his name? I wonder what became of him and his games), and to a lesser extent Braid. They have in common beautiful, stylised environments, equally beautiful but somewhat elusive ambient music, and a distinct wordlessness that makes any plot aethereal and up to interpretation.

I don't know what the story of this was intended to be. Something about sorrow or loss or mental illness, probably, but in a vague way that you don't need to understand or engage with it to find the experience fulfilling. Raw emotion without mind involved. I suppose following from what I just said, perhaps being vague about it was the point, so the player could read into it as they saw fit.

There were a bunch of female statues like this one throughout the game, which were fairly obviously representative of the person the player character thing was supposed to represent, or maybe just her relevant emotions in a general sense (so a statue would represent "loss" rather than "her feeling loss"). Something I found interesting were their proportions, more distinctly average than you'd usually see in a statue, not at all sexualised despite being naked. I wonder whether other people notice such things.

I haven't read anything about the game at all beyond the comment that recommended it to me; I didn't even read the description! So everything I've said here is based entirely on my experiences of a single playthrough.

I'm pleased that it's done so well in terms of sales and feedback; it certainly deserves it.



On a personal note, though, it was difficult to get into at first, not because it was bad, but because it was good, and successful, and so different to what I'm making myself. My first play session was about an hour, and my mind was mostly flooded by negative thoughts for the duration. I wasn't criticising the game, but there were a lot of things that were especially impressive about it that just made me wonder what had gone so right in the creators' lives for this to be their minds' fruit, and what had gone so wrong with mine (or rather, I know what's gone wrong with mine, and it set off a chain of thoughts about that. Great).

I quit fairly quickly to give myself a bit of time to mentally recover, and returned to it today looking forward to playing it. So I'm glad that negativity didn't last long. It's a shame the game wasn't longer, though I also feel it was the right kind of length where it didn't overstay its welcome or grow stale (even so, apparently only 41% of people have reached the end; I suppose this is probably fairly high though, relative to other games). Hopefully this experience will allow me to explore other indie games for inspiration now, and I look forward to giving more of them a try!

I did think a lot while playing about how games like this represent abstraction in a way I admire and would aspire to, but I wonder how important the lack of dialogue is in making most people perceive it as enjoyably arty rather than inaccessible or off-putting. It's probably very important! And that makes me wonder whether my dialogue- and "Mind"-heavy things will ever be as appealing... Perhaps not, but I just need to tell myself that everything has its place, and not all creations need to aim for the same target.

Also, the credits at the start listed a handful of people, which made me feel a bit less bad since it's not as if this was all made by one person. The credits at the end were even longer; it's interesting how only those few were considered the main developers even though many people had their hand in it somewhere. Even the "music" header listed three names. Interesting.

Anyway, I also wanted to write about what I've been up to myself this past week; I've made a lot! I'll probably write another post about that either later today or tomorrow. How exciting.