How Interactivity Can Lend a New Dimension to Storytelling

 by Alice Clarke

Often, we talk about literature or art as a conversation. A piece of media will influence your thoughts and feelings, which will influence your perception of the media as you continue to experience it, and so on. In this way you can go back and forth in a dialogue, and even if the text might not change you could have entirely different conversations with the same book at multiple points in your life. Although this dialogue is present in any piece of media, nowhere is the conversation between a story and the person experiencing it more explicit and malleable than in the world of video games.

It’s commonplace for developers to bring stories into their games to serve other aspects of the experience they want to enhance, but for the purposes of this article I want to focus on a game that takes the opposite approach - where nearly every aspect of the experience is designed to tell a central story. While there are many incredible games that do this, from interactive visual novels like Scarlet Hollow to subversive roleplaying games like Undertale, I want to focus on just one - Gris.

If you approached Gris from a mechanical perspective, you might call it a platformer. In theory, the moment-to-moment experience consists of you steadily making your way through the world and solving puzzles to push forward. However, despite the fact that it doesn’t have a word of dialogue it managed to move me to tears on more than one occasion, in a way that would be impossible to achieve in any other medium.

The game is not subtle about its themes, or with its visual storytelling, but it doesn’t have to be. You’re introduced to the character you play as in a beautifully hand-animated scene of her singing, held in the palms of a statue of an older woman. Then, something cracks and her voice catches - she gasps, and the statue begins to crumble. She falls as colour drains from the world, and her small frame continues to fill the screen as she hits the ground. Here, the game pulls its first masterstroke: there’s no clear moment when the rough animation transitions to the crisp vector art that characterises the majority of the game. You might be left waiting, staring at her soft breathing for minutes before you realise that the only thing that will make her get up is you.

Against convention, the camera doesn’t zoom out as she pushes herself to her feet, or as she begins to trudge forward with her head bowed. If you take your hand off the button for a moment, she’ll collapse. If you try to jump, or do anything that might speed her progress along she’ll slump back to the ground, and have to pick herself up all over again. This continues for an excruciatingly long time, as the camera shifts from the girl swallowing your whole field of vision, to a view that shows the endless, bleached landscape she’s been swallowed by.

I’m sure I don’t have to spell out most of the metaphor here, but what I want to get across is how all of the emotions you might normally be feeling experiencing this scene are multiplied by the simple act of holding down one button. It forces you to understand the monotony of her despair in a visceral and unavoidable way, and I cannot urge you enough to play this game and feel it for yourself.

After this sequence, the “game” part of the game sets in, and although there is a lot to analyse in everything from the puzzles to the environment design, for the sake of brevity I will focus on the moments that to me best represent the unique strengths of the medium.

One of the most impactful details for me was that at any time, you can try to sing. The game won’t tell you how, but halfway through my hand slipped, and I found the button you need to press. The girl’s voice catches, she gasps, and in a final twist of the knife if you don’t keep her moving afterwards she’ll begin to cry.

This discovery only makes it more impactful when in the final act, the girl gets her voice back. Without spoiling more than I already have, the game shows you that you can use her voice to bring life back to the largely empty world you’ve been journeying through. While there are points where you need to do this to progress, this ability means so much more than simply gaining a new method of solving puzzles. In an inspired design choice, every inch of the world has a flower that can bloom, a vine you can send shooting up. If you choose, you just can just stop. Slow down, and revel in the life and colour you bring shooting in veins through the world, as you sing in harmony with the music that has already been accompanying you through your journey.

In the ending of Gris, there is another gorgeous cutscene, which I refuse to spoil, but unlike many other games, this isn’t when the credits roll. Instead, you’re back in the hub you return to at the start of each level, and the bridge into the sky that you’ve been building throughout the game is complete. You walk, away from the last statue of your mother, in silence for the first time since the game began, into the clouds. You fade to white, and that is when it ends. You are the one who gets to walk her into the sky, bringing her journey full circle. The idea of ending the story like this would be ridiculous in any other medium, but as a game, nothing else could have been more powerful.