This week I played Gorogoa which is developed by Buried Signal and published by Annapuma Interactive on Steam. The target audience for this game is basically the people who love exploring a new world in a slow pace, enjoys visual arts and has a strong ability of spatial reasoning.
In Gorogoa, puzzles are not designed to be obstacles for players to solve in order to move to the next part of the story; instead, they are primarily how the story is told. By requiring players to create connections rather than simply solve problems, the game turns puzzle-solving into both a narrative and an emotional experience.
One of Gorogoa’s core mechanics is that players can rearrange, overlap, and zoom into image panels to create new spatial connections. As the game rarely directly explains the correct solution, these mechanics encourage the players to think about how they can build connections by dragging and overlapping the panels. Players can try multiple ways of observing and testing in order to advance the story. They gradually uncover the narrative by making these discoveries themselves. Instead of directly telling the players the storyline and letting the players receive it, players would feel that they are piecing the story themselves. Every successful puzzle not only unlocks the next scene, but also reveals new information about the world and the protagonist. As a result, progressing through the puzzles is inseparable from progressing through the narrative. Gorogoa is one typical example of embedded stories in which stories are hidden in the environment and discovered through exploration. As the game embeds clues within the environment rather than presenting them explicitly, players must interpret visual details to understand both the puzzles and the story. Environmental details within each panel act as subtle clues, encouraging players to carefully observe visual elements instead of relying on explicit instructions.
The puzzles in Gorogoa are basically finding out the correct way of re-arranging the panels and making the full use of each possibility of zoom in or zoom out chance the panels give you. The game also provide some hints. For example, one of the pictures indicates that players need to place the blue star in the right direction in order to make the pointer of the clock to rotate.
The puzzles drive the players to explore the world which could lead to a further step in revealing more information. Instead of merely working as a lock to some information, the puzzles actually tell the story and information themselves. Also, puzzles could help control pacing and help players understand better, which differs from a novel. These dynamics make the players feel curious in the process of telling the story. As players can control their own pace of story revealing and sometimes they could be struck in the process of solving the puzzles, their curiosity would increase because they tried really hard to get the right result. Moreover, these puzzles bring the players a strong senses of discovery because they are engaged in the story through puzzles.
Gorogoa requires few cultural knowledge background. It has few dialogue and sentence that require the players to fully understand to help they play the game. It also does not include any specific historical knowledge, so people with different backgrounds can all play the game.However, it requires the players to have some basic spatial reasoning ability. Players need to find out the connection between different panels or figure out the similarity in different part of different panels in order to solve the puzzles. Also, patience is also something that is specially important for players of this game as some of the puzzles are really hard to solve and take a long time. I nearly gave up for several times because I was confused by some of the puzzles and could hardly solve them by myself. For the players who love fast pace games, they might find Gorogoa boring as the story reveals really slow and you need to contract on it full-heartedly for a long time.
Compared with other puzzle games such as Portal, Gorogoa places much less emphasis on solving increasingly difficult logical challenges. Instead, its puzzles function primarily as a storytelling device, making narrative progression inseparable from gameplay. However, I also think the game could better support new players by providing an optional hint system. While the absence of explicit guidance strengthens the sense of discovery, some puzzles rely heavily on trial and error, which may discourage players who are unfamiliar with this style of puzzle design.
