Game: Gorogoa
Audience: All ages
Developer: Buried Signal
Platform: steam
Gorogoa is a piece of art which demonstrates the depth of reality, and articulates the empathetic beauty of the lived experience of others. The mechanics, and aesthetics flow into one, in order to use two-dimensional images to render the living, breathing world behind them.
For my critical play I did the game Gorgoa. The aesthetic of the game is essentially a type of storybook.
Without any instructions, just subtle cues, the players is invited to pull apart the world.
Here’s an example of this.
In Gorogoa, the jigsaw pieces are the world itself, which pull apart into separate worlds of themselves. Each image that you pull from another on the grid is usually inspectable, explorable, and with unique animations and characters. They also have other items inside of them which can be used to connect to other jigsaws.
I use the term jigsaws lightly, as you can have characters from one scene walk to another. Just when you think you understand it, you’ll have the game gently introduce another mechanic, like side-by-side connections:
Often connecting wildly different pieces of the world, and wildly similar ones together to create new worlds in the in between.
You’ll have moments where a dystopia zooms out to be a dream in a depressed mans head, or zooms into being a boiler dial altered by the magnetic pull of a star in another scene.
It slowly turns from a drag and drop star-block-in-star-hole game to a game with resemblance to portal as you guide objects to through your tears in dimensions to new areas.
Overall a great, inspirational game which elevates the puzzle genre.
