Okay, so first off, I would just like to say that if you haven’t played GRIS before and are looking for a critical review to see if you would like it, just stop reading and go play the game right now. Buy it, download it, whatever way you can get your hands on this masterpiece, I promise you won’t regret it. Just do it. Go! Stop reading! What are you still doing here! GET OUTA HERE.
ahem
Right, anyways, let’s get some things out of the way:
- I mention this in almost every post, but it’s an important thing to remember that no game is perfect. There’s always room for improvement and GRIS certainly has its rough edges, but overall this game does a lot right.
- I played this game as part of what some of my friends and I have dubbed our “Video Game Book Club” For this, we choose a game (one that has a short play-time), play them independently, then discuss our thoughts about it. I’ll be drawing from some of their feedback for this.
- One last thing (unrelated, but more as reassurance and refocus for myself): this game actually made me cry. It made two of us cry, actually. It was evocative, emotional, and entirely too personal in its message, and I couldn’t help but tear up beside myself. With that said, this is a critical look at the user experience GRIS has to offer, so I promise to stay as objective as possible while discussing the features.
So, with that, fall with me into a beautiful work of art; the magnificent design of GRIS…
FEEDBACK:
So, first thing’s first, one of my favorite topics: Feedback. This area of UX design is multifaceted, so it’s a bit of a monster to tackle in analysis, but even bigger in actual implementation. Yet Nomada Studio covered all their bases with this. GRIS has a number of UX features that offer phenomenal user feedback. With this first part, I’ll talk about the pairing of the controls and aesthetics to create the smooth and graceful player experience that pervades GRIS.
In the game’s visual design and aesthetic, because the character and the environment all move in flowing and delicate manner, it’s fair that a player might assume the controls are going to feel slow or bogged. After all, every movement of the main character looks slow or “intentional”. The animations are clear, her dress flows with every movement, and her movements are delicate, slow, and smooth.
However, being a “platformer” video game, tight controls and movement are a necessity. Platformers utilize movement as their main focus for a mechanic, so responsive controls allow for acute and accurate inputs and corrections to maneuver within tricky environments. This is all to be done without bogging the player down. Nomada Studios did well to make sure this happened. GRIS’s controls are tight, responsive, and incredibly effective despite the initial appearance.
While the feedback and “game-feel” are responsive, the aesthetics do a fantastic job of making them “seem” graceful, smooth, and flowing. This was done through animations rather than actual controls or responsiveness. Mainly, the character’s dress. This is where the game’s animations really shine, and Nomada Studios must have put an incredible amount of time and effort into it’s aesthetics and animations. One particular example is simply when the player turns from one direction to the other: a very brief animation of her dress whipping up and flowing behind her when she turns. It’s probably only a couple of frames long, but it offers a surprising amount to the feeling of gracefulness and flow.
The character’s jump animations act in the same way. The small cloud of dust that rises from the ground directionally with her as the dress lengthens going up, then billows while falling. It all gives a visceral feel to the action, again adding to the game’s graceful aesthetics without compromising the responsiveness of a platformer.
GRIS also offers some more unique player experiences through the inclusion of different abilities and mechanics that the player obtains through game-progression. They work primarily to add variety in puzzles and problem solving, but also offer a different game-feel and user experience upon use.
The Block ability is the best example of this. The character’s dress forms into a large block that weighs her down and makes her near immovable. It takes half a second to wind-up, but then the character slams down onto the ground with an audible “thud” and a screen-shake effect to offer a sense of weight and heaviness. The controls immediately become labored and agonizingly slow. Moving in either direction takes much longer, and Falling in this form sees her plummet like a rock.
Another mechanic, the Bird Jump mechanic, is the polar opposite of this. This allows the player to leap off of small flocks of red birds that propel them high into the air. It’s a smooth animation coupled with quiet and airy sound effects while the character’s dress flicks behind her, offering an extremely graceful user experience.
The players also gain a mechanic that allows them to change into a swimming form when in water. The sudden allowance of full directional movement is a great change of pace, and the experience of swimming underwater is mimicked though a slight reduction in the responsiveness of the controls. It’s implemented just enough to be noticeable, but not so much as to bog the player down like so many underwater areas of video games.
(couldn’t find a .gif, lol)
Player feedback in GRIS wonderfully utilizes delicate sound effects, variety in animations, and variable input responsiveness to convey complex gameplay experiences of environment and mechanics, all while utilizing a smooth and tight control system to allow for a positive play experience in the face of delicate aesthetics.
LEADING DESIGN:
In the same sense, the variety of new mechanics always presents difficult areas for design. Players are offered something new and the game asks for them to learn how and when to use it. This is when leading design comes into play.
Leading design is when the game first “shows” the player how a mechanic works while within the constraints of a safe environment. Somewhere that the player can “see” or experience a new mechanic without fear of failure and prepare for incoming puzzles or skill-testing environments. While GRIS’s doesn’t have a “death” or failure system in place, the player can still miss a jump or misuse a mechanic and be set back in a puzzle (such as falling down a far distance they had just climbed). This is the most gracefully done when the designers are able to show them without the use of tooltips or pop-ups. While it’s an effective way to teach a player, tool-tips or boxes of text pull the player out of the experience, and they interrupt the flow of gameplay. However, “showing” rather than telling lets the player see and experience for themselves, learning in a more organic process that helps them become more invested in their play experience.
The first example of this I noticed was incredibly simple, but incredibly effective. The forest section of GRIS has block-shaped trees that the player is able to use as platforms. As an example of leading design, before I reached a minor difficulty platforming section, I was forced to jump through a section that had a tall block tree, out of reach, and a small gap to jump over beneath it. When I jumped, the leaves of the tree disappeared. The platform was gone. Jumping again had the leaves reappear. The next section had me carefully measuring and planning my jumps, making sure not to make my footholds disappear beneath me.
There’s many instances of this type of leading design throughout all of GRIS, and while I’ve seen better implementations of it through less obvious “educational design”, it’s still a great show of Nomada’s comprehensive grasp of creating positive user experiences and the ability to implement it.
LEVEL DESIGN:
Finally, one last thing I want to talk about that I think Nomada Studios did well is level-design. The team was able to create incredibly unique and visually stunning areas such as windy wastelands, dense forests, dark caverns, and a celestial castle in the sky. At the same time though, every area followed the same theme in its direction and the objectives to follow, allowing for enough consistency to keep the player from feeling lost or unsure of what to do.
Each unique environment/area has its own “hub” location: a large, main area that has branching paths splitting off of it. These paths each have one collectible objective at the end, and they then loop back around to drop the player back in the hub area where the objectives are to be brought.
These hubs act as the main focal point of each unique area and work to ground the player in a consistency that allows them to explore without getting lost in a large play environment. It also gives them clear and actionable objectives in an otherwise unclear game. Without words, quests, or obvious guidance, the player experiences, multiple times over, these similar patterns of gameplay. It allows them to form clear objectives themselves, knowing exactly what outcome will come of what decision. Coupled with the incredibly unique visual and mechanical design of each area, this offers a fantastic clarity that helps each environment feel very different from the last, yet familiar enough to give them clear and actionable objectives. This is what I would deem fantastic user experience design.
Okay, now is the time I talk about the areas of GRIS’s UX design that are a little lacking, or that aren’t quite implemented as well as they could be.
ENVIRONMENTAL CLARITY:
Firstly, the biggest thing that jumped out at me (and my friends in our VGBC) was the lack of clarity in the environmental constraints. By this I mean the level boundaries: walls, floors, objects, and otherwise physical assets. At times it was extremely difficult to determine a wall that blocked my path from a wall in the background or forefront that I was able to move past. With little offered to denote depth in this 2D side-scroller, there’s only the slightest and subtlest difference that differentiates a tangible to an intangible asset.
The only environment where I didn’t have this problem was the last one, the celestial castle in the sky, where physical boundaries were denoted through a more filled-in color of blue contrasting with the translucence of the rest of the map. I was only able to pick out the differences nearing the end of the other areas, but by then it was too late.
These constraints, while aesthetically consistent with the rest of the maps’ art style and color schemes, are a bit too vague. If I were to offer a suggestion for some potential changes in this type of design, I think we could pull from the sky castle environmental assets and use them as a good jumping point. While this area used opacity to denote boundaries, we could use things like obvious color differences (darker or brighter to stay within the same scheme), material effects like cracked solid surfaces, or obvious shading differences to offer depth.
CAMERA ISSUES:
Other areas of gameplay that I found a bit troublesome were the large complexes and maps where the camera would pan far out to give the player scope and direction. This is all fine and dandy, but the problem I had is that the player character would become so small in the scope that it’s possible to actually lose track of their location.
Most of the time this isn’t a problem as they are the only moving thing on the screen, and that movement naturally draws player-attention. However, some of the assets in the forefront of the environment can hide the character, or the lighting could hide their location for a moment, but nothing would be done to tell the player where they are otherwise.
One specific instance I have in mind was while I was swimming through an underwater castle. It was a triple whammy of non-obvious physical walls, many forefrontal assets like pillars and window frames, plus different lighting changing along the edges. I ended up losing myself near the bottom of the screen and had to just randomly move the joystick until I saw a flash of movement from behind the bright lighting and the objects hiding the character. It only happened once, but there were a few other close calls like this, and they all pulled me out of the play experience. As a suggestions to possibly avoid these occurrences, I think adding a thin and/or dull highlight around the character during the moments of a panned out camera, or while behind the environmental objects would do wonders.
DROP DOWN FEATURE:
Finally, as a simple quality of life improvement that I think could be added, is the ability to drop down through the platforms that the player is allowed to jump up through. Otherwise, as I understand how it is in its current state, if there is a platform that splits up and down, the character will automatically take the higher road. The player needs to run to the edge of the platform, if there even is one, and drop off to go down. Even if the next lowest area is only a small drop below, there’s no option to fall down to it from the one the character is on. Being able to hold down+jump (or some other control scheme) and drop down a platform would be a convenient feature and could improve the player experience, overall.
CONCLUSION:
There’s so much more I wish I could mention about this game. Mechanics I wish were explored a little more. The brilliant story-telling through stunning visuals and an unbelievably evocative soundtrack. The open interpretations and different meanings that each of us in the VGBC found from the game. The emotional impact it had…
GRIS is a short, four-hour, emotional masterpiece that tackles heavy subjects with an unabashedly aggressive, yet equally graceful approach to it, all the while implementing incredible UX and game design strategies that make the play experience all the more impactful. Nomada Studios has proven to be a talented bunch of developers who are capable of producing incredible player experiences through tactful skill.
Thanks for reading.
Adam Cockman 