This week, I played Gorogoa, which is a puzzle game published by Annapurna Interactive for anyone who likes storytelling and puzzle games. The gameplay consists of moving and interacting with panels of artwork to progress a character’s journey to find different colored apples. The player must find the relationship between the panels on the screen and how to move the character along, thus experiencing the story with the player. Gorogoa shows that puzzles do not merely interrupt or supplement the narrative of a game, but instead the process of solving the puzzles is the narrative in itself and allows for an immersive and thought provoking experience for the player.
Compared to other puzzle games, all of the puzzles in Gorogoa are connected. The game is not about solving independent, sequential puzzles, rather about connecting and working with an entire scene consisting of 4 panels that can also be interacted with themselves. Mechanics that the player has for panels range from zooming out or zooming in on certain objects, separating two components of a panel into two panels, moving the positions of panels to connect entire scenes, etc. This gameplay creates the sense that unrelated or distant individual stories are connected, giving a fictional storytelling experience that makes up the game’s world. This design of puzzles enhances the story, with every puzzle being an extension of the world with shifting perspectives and transformations that create the story. These mechanics serve as a method of environmental storytelling in themselves.
The design of this puzzle also creates an enjoyable experience for the player since the player must explore and discover connections between the panels in working towards the solution to ultimately piecing together the narrative to find all of the apples. The player can engage with all of the panels with many possibilities while piecing together the solution. These connections can seem a bit more intuitive and understandable after the solution unfolds and becomes recognizable, giving the player the V-8 response. Many of the elements of the panels function as what they are – such as magnets, bowls, etc, and some function in less recognizable ways – such as various objects such as lamps being used as frames. The combination of interactions is exciting to explore.
I have also played Monument Valley before, which is similar to Gorogoa in the use of challenging the player to interact with different perspectives and actions to piece together puzzles. Gorogoa uniquely has more of an underlying story, in which every level of the puzzle is directly contributing to the same overall theme and story. Gorogoa creates a sense of a narrative iteratively unfolding, thus seeming more continuous and deep than games such as Monument Valley. I personally found the game more engaging than Monument Valley, where I had to pay attention to more details and follow the narrative of the game, however it was also a lot more difficult and thought consuming to play.
Something that I struggled with in Gorogoa was that I found the gameplay to be a bit difficult at certain steps. There are no tutorials or instructions in the game, and thus I found myself often struggling and completely stuck. The puzzles do become progressively more difficult and more involved, giving the player an opportunity to ramp up their familiarity with the game, however I often feel that I was not prepared to solve a puzzle and just blindly clicked around and repeated the same actions trying to discover anything new. One example of this was towards the beginning of the game, on just the second level, I had pieced together based on a hint on a painting piece on one of the panels generally where I would need to find the apple for the level, but was stuck for 20+ minutes on figuring out how to get my character to walk in a certain direction. I repeatedly examined hints, and ultimately found the solution by accident when I had just dragged panels in random directions and realized that a certain piece was separable. This mechanic was not at all intuitive to me and would have been difficult for me to have learned by the time I needed to do it. I had multiple such moments later in the gameplay as well, however I did appreciate the challenge of these puzzles as it felt rewarding to discover new mechanisms and complete more complex challenges.
Gorogoa does not make many assumptions about the player and their background knowledge. The puzzles do not refer to any culture or concepts specifically, and they seem to hinge more on pattern recognition and trial and error skills. The game expects players to infer the relationships between objects and characters across different panels and look for similarities in scenes, either conceptually or visually. The game is very inclusive in this sense since anyone should be able to approach these puzzles fairly, however make the game much more difficult to play for those who do not enjoy abstract thinking or do not prefer to exercise some level of visual spatial reasoning. It seems that the game explicitly includes people of all backgrounds, but may somewhat exclude people who lack a certain type of visual puzzle solving skill.
