I played Gorogoa a while back, so I do not remember a lot of the specific details from the game. The first time I played through it, I remember being surprised by how closely the artistic choices and the puzzle design were woven together in a way I had not really seen before. A few days ago I downloaded and played some of it again. The feeling came rushing back. After almost too long, I still see moving one picture into another as being less about solving a puzzle than moving the story itself.
Gorogoa is a puzzle game created by Jason Roberts, developed by Buried Signal, and published by Annapurna Interactive. It is available on several platforms, including PC, mobile devices, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox. I think its primary target audience is players who enjoy quiet, slower-paced puzzle games, hand-drawn art, wordless storytelling, and active observation rather than speed-based games. What I am trying to explain here through the connection of Gorogoa‘s design is that the game creates a narrative experience by introducing its players into the role of a visual editor of the narrative. There is no specific character that is driven through the whole game in the usual way. Instead, the player is using Gorogoa‘s mechanics to adjust the scale of the visual frame, change layers, and connect visual structures and space with one another.
The central game mechanic of Gorogoa is relatively easy to understand. There are four panels on the screen. The player can drag pictures, zoom into a panel, zoom out of a panel, pull apart layers, and lay panels beside one another or on top of one another. But the relationship established through this dynamic is much stranger. I start to read each image as a possibility of a new and potential relationship rather than as a fixed visual representation. For example, a window could become a doorway. A backdrop could represent a journey. A decorative pattern may suddenly line up with another scene and provide a more useful visual element. The aesthetic result is not just the satisfaction of solving a logic-based question. Rather, it feels like an emotional realization that there were always two separate moments, spaces, or memories interconnected, but the player only discovered that link through the process of experiencing and moving them.
Pg.1 The apple and bowl only become meaningful when separate panels suddenly become one connected visual relationship; motion weaves the scene together.
This is one of the aspects of Gorogoa that makes it difficult to summarize in a straightforward manner. There is a boy. A strange creature. Repeated colors. A fruit. A building. A book. An image that looks like a religious figure. Age. Disaster. Return. However, I do not feel that Gorogoa functions because the player simply decodes each image one by one in order to understand the narrative. Rather, Gorogoa has players asking relationship questions with each pair of images. What can be connected? What can be moved? What can become part of another image? Therefore, the player learns about the story through the search for visual meaning.
In this sense, I believe Gorogoa is able to differentiate itself from another game, Monument Valley, even though both games possess an aesthetic experience that features beautiful puzzle-based design set in impossible visual space. In Monument Valley, I feel that I am primarily engaged in assisting Ida’s movement through architectural space through the rotation of structures, moving platforms, and creating paths for a character. In Gorogoa, the player is not only guiding a character across a common path of continuous visual space. Instead, the player is essentially editing pictures so that many spaces, scales, and periods of visual time can be connected to one another. Monument Valley allows for movement through an illustrated design of a storybook. Gorogoa provides an interactive experience using the storybook itself to create new sequences by editing the pictures inside it.
Because of this function, puzzles do not serve as mechanisms to deny individuals access to a story until the player demonstrates they know how to perform tasks for the story. Rather, puzzles are the mechanism through which the story is made visible to the player. A successful solution gives the player an “aha” moment because they have learned something about relationships between images by completing an action task, instead of only completing a knowledge task. In other words, through playing Gorogoa, a player is trained to view visual variance as a possible means of searching for alternative relationships. A panel represents an image; images can represent memories; some panels represent locations, while other panels may represent part of some object.
At the same time, this aspect of the design also contributes to the fragility of Gorogoa, since the game’s overall structure is highly dependent on the player’s ability to reach that “aha” experience through solving a puzzle. When I previously played the game and also played part of it again, there were times when I became stuck and eventually frustrated due to the long periods of time that I could not find the connection between two images. As time passed and I still did not see the connection, my experience of exploring the images transformed from being a poetic exploration to one based mostly on trial and error. At this point I began dragging, zooming, and checking all of the details I could find, not because I had formed a clear hypothesis, but because I suspected that there might have been visual information I had overlooked. Gorogoa does contain hints, but when I played it, some of them felt quite subtle and hidden inside the same visual logic as the puzzles themselves. Therefore, once a player becomes stuck, they may feel not that they failed a logic task, but that they failed to read the image correctly. I do not wish to suggest that Gorogoa should directly explain its puzzles, because that would weaken the “aha” moment, but I do think its hint system shows the tradeoff of this design: help exists, yet it still asks the player to keep thinking visually.
Pg.2 A stuck moment.
The ethical question that is raised, in this regard, is the knowledge produced through the game within the constraints that exist inside the box. Because Gorogoa has been created mostly without words, it makes the experience less dependent on language. In that way, it is more inclusive than many puzzle games, because players do not require English reading fluency or long written instructions. However, while it does not have many words in the game, Gorogoa is not completely universal because not every player may possess similar abilities to learn through observing meaningful visual details. Some players may not have the ability to recognize or understand certain spatial relationships. Some players may have visual impairments, or may have difficulty reading abstract visual messages patiently.
I do not believe the ethical tension regarding language provides a reason for weakening the overall experience of Gorogoa. Instead, I feel that this ethical factor provides an interesting perspective for being able to critically evaluate design elements associated with the game. Therefore, Gorogoa avoids one type of exclusion, language, by widely utilizing another type of literacy, visual and spatial literacy. The success of Gorogoa is attributed to the fact that it has built an experience where players are encouraged to look closely at the composition of the various images used throughout the game. The risk of Gorogoa is that not all players are equally invited to participate in the act of closely looking in order to gain an understanding of the narrative connection.
