‘Gris’: A Meditation on Parents, Life and Death – Part Two
Grief is not something we can be taught abstractly, but something we must first experience and then, while it surrounds us, figure out. Gris’s main theme, “learning how to grieve,” does this spectacularly. The game invites you into the emotional experience of a grieving person, which means Gris should not be an emotionally easy game to play. This is because it is a practice in poetic form about accepting that parents will die, that childhood will end, and that the safety parents afford us will become our responsibility. The main character in Gris portrays how she takes up responsibility for her emotions. She navigates the world by solving delicate looking puzzles, which in turn connect constellations. For me though, connecting those constellations was more like connecting neurons, especially since connecting them rewarded you with a new path or new tools. A person managing grief must look for new paths forward and ways to manage the grief they have, as well. In Gris, this is expressed through collecting points of light that plug into holes that connect the platform you’re on to a different level. These points of light also come into play when new tools are needed, like the float ability or the previously mentioned block-dress ability.
Through these connective neurons (or constellations) the character interprets the world differently. She opens up new pathways using the tools. She connects her current paths to other previously out of reach ones. The character accepts that misery is hers, yet she doesn’t remain in it. She seeks new ways to see the world and new ways to interact with the world. These connections are not without their hardships though. The player navigates the world with little to no guidance, braving winds, escaping from beasts, and making friends along the way. At points she encourages others, coaxing the little block-creature out from hiding. Later she encounters beasts, such as the black song-bird that blusters and bruises her. Through all of her adventures, she doesn’t relent, even as she breaks through crumbling foundations to plumb the underworld of her grief. The character is a person who actively pursues to understand and overcome grief’s hardships. She takes responsibility for her emotions, braving a world where the safe hand, from the game’s beginning, remains a distant and short lived memory.
That the game continued to employ the hand motif as a way to separate chapters was a brilliant design decision. Not only does it function poignantly as a call back to the gorgeous intro, but it allows Gris to challenge common notions about grief. Grief is not simply pain, but a learning process on how to transition from loving people to loving memories. The most significant moments where Gris delves into the main character’s grief occur when she comes to the fallen hands. These are times when the character finds short-lived solace in fallen statue’s hands, ones reminiscent of the hand from the beginning. Here she curls up, just above its palm, into the fetal position. There are four hands that she curls up above, each time releasing different colors, which can symbolize all her tension, grief, emotions, and memories. These scenes are significant since they mirror the beginning scene where she stands in the original hand. The first hand suggests the safety of a parental figure. Here the main character has stability under the watchful eye of a parent. The subsequent hands are painful callbacks to what she had previously, crumbling memories she can only visit. For her, there is no chance to regain the familiarity she once had. She must now become her own stability. We see this poetic move in the final scene as she confronts the spectre of the statue.
After these short reprieves in the fallen hands, she must return to the puzzling world. These moments where the character curls into the palms are moments of pain and memory for her. Each time she does this she revisits the comfort from the past, revitalizing the safety from her parents just for a moment. Gris uses the hands as symbols for memories, which blur the lines between comfort and pain as the main character figures out how to move from loving a person to loving memories. These symbol laden scenes might have moments of solace, yet we glimpse real grief in her when she curls into the fallen hands.
With all the pain Gris exudes from the imagery and theme, at no point in the game does the game interrupt itself with a death sequence. The game smartly lacks a death possibility as it shows a person’s experience passing through emotional states rather than a physically lived experience. This small brilliance makes Gris function as a metaphor. It is a metaphor because emotional death isn’t possible in the way physical death is. A memorable scene this occurs in was when the character swims through the caverns escaping the shadowed eel. The character is forced to swim, just slightly out of reach for the eel. Through its non-death gameplay, Gris further exposes something significant about grief. We are not the fragile creatures we were lead to believe when confronting grief.
Our exposure to grief is a natural consequence of living, something Albert Camus called “the absurd.” He believed that as we live with and love the people we grow up around we have the absurd duty to expect them to die, even as we are loving them. From “the absurd” it is understandable how we perceive grief as something that assails us and our loved ones, while also diminishing us to the point that we have no power. Our lack of power comes from the fact that people are destined to die.
This might be especially grim for a game to present to a player, yet, Gris doesn’t solely present the frailty and mortality inherent in ourselves and in our parents but also points towards a redeeming aspect about grief:that grief is a natural, nonlethal, and, in time, surmountable process. Gris provides this insight in two distinct ways: First by how death is not a consequence of the game’s world and second, by how the main character utilizes the hands, which function as callbacks to the beginning, as ways to alter her perception about her loss.
Because the game structures its gameplay around puzzles and death not being possible, the game emulates our emotional states. The connective tissue between gameplay and our emotions is that negative emotions are not deadly things. They might be scary and confusing at times, but emotions remain abstract events incapable of ending our lives. The game demonstrates this through the the bird/eel beasts that chase you and the heights the character leaps from. Each potential life ending event in the game, instead, points to an emotional experience the character has. These events also affect the player with positive intent.
Gris influences a player’s emotions vicarious a character’s physical movements through a world. The interaction between player and character leaves leaves the player with a sense that they helped the character transition into a new way to live without a parent. Watching a character transition through this might move a person away from the all too common perspective that emotions are intractable events hidden in the rippling skin of our brains, and rather, get a person to see that emotions are complex puzzles to solve and overcome. The game has so much potential to do this because, rather than treating the main character’s obstacles as pathways that lead to doom, the game allows you to freely explore these puzzles. That freedom to explore the puzzles is needed since they add to the world’s delicate complexity. That complexity speaks through how the world’s noises and visuals work together to create a tinkling machinery like atmosphere. The game sounds like the fragile gears inside a wrist watch. These noises and visuals translate directly to the puzzles. The majority of the puzzles are ones that require the player to collect stars to unlock invisible pathways in the air. That the pathways are invisible mimes the struggle to navigate one’s own emotions. The character seeking out the stars to connect the constellations holds a similar image to ourselves seeking out thoughts to connect how and why we feel the way we do. This all takes exploration and Gris doesn’t punish exploration with death.
The same can be said of emotions. The freedom to explore them is always available to a person, yet we struggle with doing that because, within our short sighted view, their complexity makes them feel so daunting and isolating. Our inability to express those complex, multifaceted feelings by words constructs a false prison around our emotional states, which in turn falsely isolates us, not only from our communities and the world, but from our initial emotions. The moments in Gris where the character is able to explore has these same separating scenarios. The player will find the character can’t progress because of a wall or a ledge that’s slightly too high. The artificial boundaries in the game are important though, since they mirror the relationship we have with our emotions. Sometimes we’ll find ourselves unable to solve one of our emotional puzzles due to a lack of knowledge or lack of emotional tools. The walls in Gris illustrate the need to seek out the stars, to connect the constellations, and gain tools to navigate the world. Our inability to solve our emotional puzzles are similar to these walls and illustrate a need to learn and reflect more to gain tools and connect thoughts.
As grief goes it presents a wall that can feel insurmountable, such as losing a parent. A person who has lost a parent has not only lost access to the safety and assurances we can get from no one else, but it also means a sense of our childhood is lost. This is because parents have an intimate knowledge of our childhoods and so function as storytellers for our childhoods. Getting to know your parents is then vital when coming to know yourself. Gris uses gameplay and masterful aural and visual rhetoric to demonstrate grief.
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