Descripton

Gris is the kind of game I find almost impossible to recommend without immediately second-guessing the words I am using — because nothing I say quite captures what it actually feels like to be inside it. Developed by Barcelona-based Nomada Studio and published by Devolver Digital in 2018, it is a wordless platformer about a young woman moving through a world drained of colour, gradually reclaiming it as she heals.

There is no combat, no death, no fail state. What there is instead is some of the most breathtaking hand-painted visual art ever put into a game, a soundtrack that I still think about years later, and an emotional journey that manages to feel both deeply personal and completely universal. Gris does not play like most games. It feels more like being walked through someone’s grief and coming out the other side.

Why Gris stands out

The origin story of Gris is one of my favourites in indie game history, partly because it sounds so unlikely. Two programmers — Adrián Cuevas and Roger Mendoza, both veterans of AAA studios including Ubisoft Montreal and Ubisoft Barcelona — returned home to Barcelona and met Conrad Roset, a celebrated watercolour and ink illustrator known for his Muses series, in a bar. Roset had long wanted to bring his art into games but had no idea how. Cuevas and Mendoza had the technical skills but were hungry for something more personal than franchise work. They clicked immediately, founded Nomada Studio, and within two years had made Gris.

What strikes me about that origin is how completely it explains the finished game. Gris is not a game that started with mechanics and then found an art style — it is an artist’s vision that needed a game to live inside. Every design decision flows from that: the absence of combat, the absence of death, the colour-based progression, the refusal to explain the story in words. This is Conrad Roset’s world, and you are a visitor inside it.

Historically, Gris arrived at a moment when the “games as art” conversation was still contested, and it landed like a definitive argument. It won the Games for Impact award at The Game Awards 2019 and appeared on countless end-of-year lists — not as a curiosity or a tech demo, but as a genuinely great experience that happened to also be one of the most beautiful things anyone had ever put on a screen.

The Story

Gris begins with a young woman singing, her voice shattering, and the world around her crumbling into grey dust. From that opening image alone — before you have pressed a single button — the game tells you everything you need to know about what you are walking into. This is a story about loss. About the specific, physical weight of grief and what it does to the world around you.

What follows is a wordless journey through five distinct emotional landscapes, each one representing a different stage of processing pain. The world starts entirely colourless and gradually reclaims its hues — red, green, blue, yellow — as Gris finds new abilities and pushes forward. The metaphor is not subtle, but it does not need to be. What makes it work is how completely the game commits to it — every environment, every mechanical shift, every musical swell is in service of the same emotional arc.

I find the storytelling in Gris genuinely moving in a way that surprised me the first time I played it. It never tells you what happened. It never names the loss or explains the collapse. It just puts you inside the feeling of it, and trusts you to bring your own experience to fill the gaps. That openness is what makes it land differently for different people — and what makes it stick.

Graphics

I struggle to think of another game that made me stop moving just to look at the screen as often as Gris did. The art direction — built entirely from Conrad Roset’s watercolour and ink aesthetic — is genuinely unlike anything else in the genre. Soft washes of colour bloom across paper-textured environments. Ink lines curl and dissolve. Light behaves like it does in a painting rather than a simulation. The whole thing feels handmade in a way that I know intellectually required months of custom shader development, but that never once reads as digital.

What impresses me most is how the visual design evolves alongside the emotional arc. The early grey sections have a spare, almost architectural beauty — vast empty spaces that feel genuinely desolate. As colour returns, the environments become richer and more layered, until by the final act the world is so saturated and alive that the contrast with the opening feels almost overwhelming. The game uses its own visual progression as storytelling, and it does it with a precision that I find remarkable for a debut project.

Gameplay

Gris is deliberately the gentlest game in this genre — there are no enemies, no death, no fail states of any kind. What there is instead is a series of movement abilities that Gris acquires as she progresses, each one tied to the emotional stage she is moving through. A heavy stone form that lets her break through obstacles. A double jump that feels like the first breath after surfacing from water. A bird transformation that opens the world vertically in the final act. None of it is mechanically demanding, and I think that is entirely the right choice.

The puzzles are environmental and observational — reading the space, finding the path, occasionally timing a movement to music. I never felt challenged in a conventional sense, but I also never felt bored. The game kept showing me something new often enough that the lack of friction felt like a feature rather than a limitation. What Gris asks of you is attention rather than skill, and I found that genuinely refreshing.

My honest note is that players looking for mechanical depth will not find it here. Gris is closer to an interactive experience than a traditional game, and approaching it on those terms makes all the difference.

Pacing

Gris runs around three to four hours and moves with the rhythm of something carefully composed rather than designed. Each new environment arrives just as the previous one has given you everything it has — there is no overstaying, no repetition, no padding. I was consistently surprised by how purposeful each transition felt, how the world seemed to know exactly when I needed something to change.

The pacing slows deliberately in certain sections — quiet stretches where you simply move through a beautiful space with no puzzle in sight — and I felt those moments were some of the most effective in the game. They give you room to sit inside the atmosphere rather than pushing through it. For a game about grief, that willingness to simply let you be still feels exactly right.

Atmosphere

The atmosphere of Gris is, for me, inseparable from its soundtrack — and I mean that as the highest possible compliment to both. Berlinist, a Barcelona-based chamber pop ensemble, composed the music in close collaboration with the development team, playing early builds and writing directly to what they experienced. The result is a score that feels genuinely grown from the game rather than applied to it — piano, strings, and vocals that shift with the emotional register of each environment in a way I have rarely heard matched in any medium.

Combined with Roset’s visual world — the way colour bleeds back into grey spaces, the way environments respond to Gris’s movement — the atmosphere achieves something I find genuinely rare. It does not tell you how to feel. It just creates a space in which feeling something becomes almost inevitable. I came out of my first playthrough in a state I can only describe as quietly shaken, which for a game with no combat and no death is a remarkable thing to have pulled off.

Where can I play Gris?

Gris is available on PC via Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, iOS, and Android. It is modestly priced and frequently on sale — one of the most accessible entry points in the genre given the quality of what you get. Nomada Studio’s follow-up, Neva, released in 2024 and shares the same painterly aesthetic and emotional ambition, making it a natural companion piece once you have finished Gris.

Similar Games

If Gris resonated with you, these two games share its commitment to atmosphere, emotional storytelling, and worlds that communicate entirely through art and music.

If you are drawn to games that use visual beauty and wordless narratives to explore grief, loss, and emotional recovery, Gris sits in wonderful company alongside Journey, Flower, and FAR: Lone Sails — each one approaching the same quietly human territory from a completely different aesthetic angle. And if the watercolour world of Nomada Studio specifically hooked you, above mentioned Neva is waiting.