For this critical play, I tried out Gorogoa, a beautifully hand-drawn puzzle game developed by Jason Roberts. I went through this play on PC, but the game is also available on major consoles and mobile. The game’s official ESRB rating is E for Everyone, but considering the respectable difficulty of the puzzles and complex yet ambiguous narrative themes, I would say it is best suited for around the ages of 14+, especially those with a love of heavily stylized art and interpretive storytelling.
The game’s core mechanic is simple yet incredibly unique. The world space consists of 4 panels that can be freely moved around a 2×2 grid. Each panel scene can reveal new interactable objects and set pieces by zooming in and out and panning. Puzzles are built around creating interactions between panels – overlapping and combining scenes to create new ones and special interactions.
Throughout my play, I found that the combination of surprise and problem solving created immense satisfaction, and the use of both explicit and implicit breadcrumbing nudged players in the right direction without breaking the game’s theming and aesthetic. However, I found that the pattern-recognition gameplay, when combined with the limited information on the screen, led to brute-forcing as a go-to strategy.
One of the most crucial qualities of a good puzzle is that its pieces, absent any problem solving, are inherently enjoyable to manipulate. Gorogoa’s puzzles deliver on this spectacularly, namely with its powerful aesthetics. Connecting two scenes and seeing a charming animation play, often depicting a surprising or fantastical result, creates a sense of whimsy, joy, and satisfaction every time you overcome a challenge.
Just putting matching panels together doesn’t carry much challenge, but where these puzzles get the most satisfying is when problem-solving is required to create interactions between panels. Panels being able to interact with each other means you’re constantly scanning each scene, thinking critically about which set pieces can logically interact. Since there’s no cost to moving panels around, the puzzles are incredibly restorable – players can test theories to their heart’s content, making that final “a-ha” moment all the more satisfying,
Many of these object interactions do rely on the player being familiar with the object’s real-world behaviors, which can potentially act as a barrier to the game’s core problem-solving loop. Gorogoa circumvents this with explicit visual breadcrumbing, such as the lamp puzzles being paired with illustrations nudging you to overlap them with star panels. Even more effective is the use of implicit breadcrumbing, where object behaviors are directly demonstrated to the player. My favorite example of this is again the broken glass puzzle, where you see the rocks break a vase first, allowing players to make the connection that those rocks could also break a cracked glass dome.
Though often incredibly rewarding, the pattern recognition-type puzzles are also one of the biggest weaknesses of this game. Pattern recognition requires you to have all the information in front of you – the only barrier between you and the solution should be your ability to deduce and identify the relationship between the pieces.
But if you don’t have all the pieces visible, how are you supposed to come to a conclusion about the pattern? In Gorogoa, since some scenes are hidden behind zooms and pans, you’ll never be able to see every single scene at once with just the 4 panels. When you manage to get two scenes on the screen with the same pattern, there’s often very little challenge in finding the connection between them.
This means the challenge shifts from identifying the pattern between pieces to FINDING those pieces to begin with, which requires far less cognitive effort and is thus far less satisfying. In my experience, the result of this is the use of brute force to solve many of the puzzles. The most viable strategy becomes mindlessly clicking through each panel until you happen to come across scenes that could fit together. This problem becomes exacerbated as puzzles get more complex, since the panels have increasingly more invisible information as the number of set pieces grows.
Generally, I find pans to be a worse offender than zooms, since with zooms you can at least still see the object, just shrunk. This means a zoomed out object is still something you can consider when looking for patterns, while an object completely off-screen is not. I think simply removing panning or just using them more sparingly would do a lot to reduce the amount of mindless clicking.
Additionally, although I mentioned before how strong breadcrumbing reduced the need for an existing understanding of how certain objects work (like lanterns or glass), some of the game’s objects are stylized to the point where understanding of what the object’s behavior is can be lost.
For example, though it is beautiful and unique visually, I have no idea what this kettle-like object is supposed to be, or why it has a thermometer (or pressure gauge?) on it. Having at least some idea of what the object and gauge are is absolutely necessary since the player needs to make the connection that putting it above a flame would cause the arm to move.
I can imagine this being exclusionary of younger players, especially since a lot of the game is styled to be rustic (how many kids would think of a dial when imagining a thermometer?). For improved accessibility, it could be worth considering aligning set pieces more closely with existing contemporary mental models of objects (like thermometers being a long stick with a red stuff in it), even if at the cost of the strength of the theming.
