Gris is a puzzle-based platform and adventure game and features 2D, watercolour-painted graphics. The playable character is a girl who initially wakes up in the hand of a stone woman. This represents the girl's mother or a similarly important person. After the girl tries to sing, her voice fails and the stone woman disintegrates. All colours disappear and a colourless, decaying world remains. Without a clear goal, you wander around, find stars that help you progress and have to solve puzzles to get more stars. In the meantime, you gain new abilities that you need for subsequent puzzles. Once you have completed a section, you encounter parts of the woman's statue and the whole world again. You meet creatures that live in stones. After each section, you return to a building, which visibly changes through recovered colours, which is strongly accentuated by the special graphics. Above this is a suggested star image, which is filled in by the stars you find. In the course of the game, you meet a flock of black birds, which later unite to form a black mass. This then appears in the form of a large bird or an eel. This black mass of emotion, especially the grief over the death of the girl's mother. There is neither writing nor language in the game. Therefore, there is no tutorial and the background story is only shown through pictures and statues in the world. Thus, the story is uncovered step by step through attentive examination of the environment. To solve the puzzles, the player must involve the environment and try out various things. For example, you have to swim up waterfalls or destroy crumbling floors.

This research project explores the possibility of learning about grief and grief processing with Gris. The play aesthetically processes the five stages of grief according to Kübler Ross (Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On Death and Dying. New York: The Macmillan Company): Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. The stages of grief are only represented metaphorically and not verbalised, so the research goal is to examine what players already learn about grief and grief processing through playing alone (first series of experiments) and to develop a didactic concept for teaching in which children and adolescents, mediated by the game and guided by teachers, can learn something about grief and grief processing. The first elaborate experimental phase has already been completed (N=64). The aim was to find out which game scenes indicate grief processing and whether grief and grief processing can be recognised without pedagogical guidance. The results of the study are currently being analysed and will soon be summarised here in short form and in more detail in the scientific report.

Subsequently, a teaching concept will be developed on the basis of these results, taking into account the results from the first survey phase. This teaching concept will then be tested and published here.