Gorogoa is an indie puzzle game developed by Jason Roberts and published by Annapurna Interactive. It is on all major platforms including XBOX, Playstation, Nintendo Switch, and PC (which I played it on). The game’s vivid and detailed artistry draws players who enjoy not just puzzles, but visually engaging narrative experiences. The art is more than just a vessel; it is part of the puzzle.
The basic puzzle mechanics of the game are centered around tiles. Players can drag, stack, and refram these tiles which changes how one experiences the story, control, and overall meaning. Similar to the game I played a few weeks ago, Superliminal, players do more than just manipulating in-game characters or objects. Players manipulate the perspective in which they view the world. This mechanic is a long-standing and extended metaphor across the game. Players find understanding through reconfiguration and changing the world they experience.
Many puzzle games that I have played before rely on finding hidden objects, logic gates, inventory systems or some combination of all three. I found Gorogoa intriguing because it does not really use any of these. By reinterpreting a 2×2 grid of tile illustrations, you are able to step through reality. Each tile is more than just a window. For example, one of the tiles was a bowl, however zooming in on it may reveal a starry sky which when overlaid with another becomes an entirely different space. This mechanic of contextualizing and contextualizing fundamentally changes the usual puzzle-solving process. When overlapping a temple’s stained glass with a childlike bedroom or connecting a city skyline with a mythical creature, the game causes the player to have to make intuitive and visual links between images. These are without words, and as such transcend barriers of country and language.
To further use the MDA framework, we can look first at the mechanics. These are simple. For the most part it is dragging and overlaying frames, and panning and zooming the camera in or out. These simple and unrestrictive dynamics promote and encourage experimentation, discovery, and those “aha” moments that we learned about this week. The aesthetics these result in evoke curiosity and wonder through the vivid and beautiful visual storytelling.
Further comparing it to other puzzle games, Gorogoa completely removes the traditional (and comfortable) GUIs that players might be used to. There are no buttons or dialouges. While the mechanics are simple and almost constrained, the interpretive space that results from the imagery is vast and expansive. Gorogoa emphasizes emergent narrative through the spacial relationships that players explore and experience. The story is not told to the player. It is not something that players simply experience. The players have to build it themself.
One of my favorite puzzles in the game was the one where I had to align a circular window with an object from space in another frame to form an eclipse. I found this so interesting because of how the eclipse forming causes time to pass. With that, we see the boy’s journey continue with the passage of time.
Something important to note with this game is the ethics and accessibility surrounding a visual game like this. By relying heavily on abstract visual associations and pattern recognition, it could alienate a non-western audience. The people that are left out of the know of “the box” could also be those without much familiarity with art or understanding metaphors and the abstract and symbolic meaning of them. Additionally, those with visual impairments likely cannot play this game. I am not sure if there is a good way to utilize an auditory assistive mode for these audiences, but I believe that the game designers should look into this if they have not already.
