This game is fantastic!

Gris is not only one of the most artistically beautiful games I've played in awhile with its rich artstyle and music, but also a near perfect example of how to teach gameplay concepts to the player without the use of a single tutorial.

This is largely a puzzle platformer so you spend most of your time here figuring out how to interact with the environment to proceed. There are many unique gameplay concepts found throughout the environment, as well as skills the character you play as gains during your playthrough. And besides a simple graphic telling you what button an ability is associated with when you first unlock one, you learn how everything interacts with each other purely through environmental storytelling. A good example of this is during a section of the game where you're in an environment with a lot of water and to progress you need to ground pound into the water with enough force to sink to the bottom. To teach this to you the game makes you ground pound through a structure and then land in water, giving you the knowledge to then progress through later puzzles in this area with knowledge you gained purely from the beautifully hand-crafted environment you're traversing. Of course on it's own this is pretty unremarkable, but the game constantly introduces new mechanics and never falters to teach them through the environment which really helps the pacing. This seems very simple and that's because it is. Teaching the player how to progress through a game's environment is no impossible task. But it's impressive here purely because of the amount of other games that fail to do this horribly, Which made a game designed this way feel very refreshing.

What's even better is when the game combines this form of environmentally learned gameplay with its story. The story here primarily centers around the 5 stages of grief and how the character overcomes her anguish. This is symbolized really well early on when you have to face your first "boss" encounter, a giant bird that lets out a blast of wind that knocks you backwards. At first this is presented as an unstoppable force you have to wait to pass before you're able to move forward. Then shortly after you're taught a way to slowly crawl through the gusts of wind without getting pushed back, until at last you have to ride the wind and use what was at first presented as an unstoppable obstacle to reach places you couldn't before. This is quite good environmental storytelling of the character persevering through the challenges she faces and coming out stronger because of it, and I'm happy to say this is far from the only time the game does this.

This entire experience is filled with amazing "show don't tell" gameplay tutorials that make all of the puzzles flow well together. I didn't have to check a walkthrough because I was stuck on a puzzle a single time during my playthrough because of just how well the game conveys information to you, which is extremely rare for a puzzle game. I know I keep bringing this up but it's because of how many other games (such as Xenoblade Chronicles 2) fail to do this properly. And instead resort to 50 tutorial screens for every minor detail, drastically affecting the game's pacing.

It's also worth mentioning how phenominal the music is here. It really brings some of the environments to life with how expressive and emotional some of the songs are, especially the final scene of the game. All of the different things the game does right: artstyle, music, gameplay, story. All come together to make a fantastic experience I'd highly recommend.

This game is EXTREMELY horny

All of the characters here spend the majority of their screen time just talking about sex in unnecessarily crude ways with some of the worst dialogue I've ever read. The constant sex talk is also the only form of comedy the game has to offer and it's NEVER funny. It's relying on the mention of a character having big boobs alone to be funny without providing any comedical nuance to any of the jokes. The worst example of these problems is with a robo-girl character named Dorothy who is stated to be specifically designed to look around the age of 10-13 and her entire personality is being a sex worker. None of the subjects this game tries to tackle are portrayed with any depth. While plenty of characters talk about sex work and the exploitative nature of this game's dystopian universe, the game's poor writting and miserable tropes disguised as characters cause none of these subjects to be given proper justice. Leaving to this entire game feeling like a story that had potential to be interesting, but was instead ignored so the writer could have a game about getting cute anime girls drunk and exchange a good and interesting story for shitty fanservice.