GRIS. 8 games with brilliant ideas for narrative

The two-dimensional, artistic platformer GRIS by Spanish studio Nomada manages to evoke strong emotions, if not as powerfully as The Last of Us: Part 2. Interestingly, you can complete it - even "max it out" - and still not understand what it's about. Over the course of this short adventure, the titular character gains new skills, and the grey world slowly becomes more colorful. Why?

As I studied some psychology at university, I quickly realised what GRIS is really about. The names given by the developers to the various stages of the game clued me in. "Denial", "Anger"... it's here that I realised that the next stages will be: "Bargaining", "Depression" and "Acceptance". In other words, I understood that the structure of Nomada Studio's game is based on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' psychological model, which describes the five stages of grief of a terminally ill patient and their family as they struggle with the news of their impending death.

Stage two - "Anger" - is dominated by the color red.

This theory is often applied to the way one experiences the loss of another person. GRIS makes use of this theme. Interestingly, in Spanish, the word means the color gray that dominates the game during the first stage (called "Denial"). In the following stages, the colors shift to red, green, blue, and finally yellow, expressing the character's changing emotional states.

In my opinion, this simple narrative trick elevates GRIS to the level of a masterpiece. Although you won't find much gameplay here, the general concept and main theme make up for it. This entry is also a great argument in support of the idea that video games can be more than "time killers"; that they can convey really important messages.

1. More about GRIS