Gris

Gris is the worst game of 2018.

Gris fails as an architectonic construct because as much as its imagery suggests beauty, the interaction with the world is empty. The details that are visually presented don't exist to the gameplay, creating a sensorial dissonance. Travelling through the landscape suggests going through stairs or small bumps of road, but the real input is pressing left and right, like if everything was flat. Gris fails as a platformer because there's no grace to the gravitational movement, no punishment for jumping wrong, no enrichment to use platforming for exploration. If you miss, you'll simply fall over and try again until you get it. Its only purpose is to trick the player that they're doing something while advancing and clearing puzzles and collectibles in order to justify that it's a game. It's so simple-minded that one wonders why it's there. It is inept as a statement about overcoming depression because of its vagueness: Instead of telling a personal viewpoint, the game uses its theme as an excuse for abstract imagery to elevate its tone to solemnity and sell itself as an artistic experience.

One just needs to compare it to other platformers that deal with the same topic to realize its lack of insight: Liz Ryerson's Problem Attic subverts rules constantly alongside a glitch aesthetic where bounds are unclear to exteriorize physical and mental prisons of people unhappy with their own identity (most specifically gender dysphoria). GAMBIT Game Lab's Elude uses its periodically weakening controls to materialize through physics the feeling of being pulled down by depression, when things that used to make you happy are no longer working, and the effort that's needed to get out of the mental abyss. Patchwork Doll's Rock Bottom sets itself into the bottom of a pit where you can't escape until you've experienced failure enough times by making death a puzzle as well as the source of an upgrade in the jump height, creating a sense of liberation after hardships. That no matter how many times you fail, there's always a way out. Even if the comparison was made with a game that I don't consider good, such as Maddy Thorson's Celeste, Gris pales is comparison as even if Celeste reveals a victimizing attitude, the game is more honest and has a purpose by using the metaphor of climbing a mountain and facing your internal demons in your path as a manifestation of overcoming mental problems. Gris's portrayal of overcoming depression is a soft experience that is distanced from the clinical condition, and is closer to romantization, without the pain behind. Setting aside how insulting it is to capitalize on sentimental appeal, the end result is that there's no statement, nothing that the game attempts, and thus, there's nothing accomplished. The game's seriousness only leads to a masquerade, as it's hollow inside.

Right now, Gris has an 84 in Metacritic. This is art, gamers claim. No wonder why videogames are the laughing stock among other disciplines; why taking games as art is a meme. Veneer is what we ask from videogames after all, and I wonder if this is everything that there's to the future of this medium. Back in 1995, Shigeru Miyamoto reportedly said when talking about Donkey Kong Country that players will put up with mediocre gameplay as long as the "art" is good. More than twenty years later, Gris proves that such a statement still rings true.