What puzzle games do well is to light up that part of our brains that likes to obsess about patterns. Looking at a puzzle usually tells you all you need to know about the rules. Symbols need to match up, shapes need to fit snugly together, a through path needs to be created or shifted between points. The rules may be simple, but it's the execution that can send our minds into an obsession, toiling over pieces we can't quite fit together despite the signalling of an underlying pattern. In real life, puzzles come in all shapes and sizes, from trying to figure out your finances to tumbling over the mistakes of your past. It makes sense, then, that somebody would eventually wrap a puzzle in themes about the past, in overcoming that past, and in a future that cannot seem to let go.
Gorogoa is a unique puzzle game in that it's function has more to do with how you move pieces around than in your actual goal. Usually, puzzle games are created with a goal in mind, and the rules in which that goal is attained changing or becoming more complex as the game ramps up in difficulty. Gorogoa comprises of four panels that can hold four images. You start with one image that has clickable areas within that allow you to zoom, or move, or otherwise explore different parts of the image. Sometimes clicking a door would send you through it, or clicking a picture on the wall or a thought bubble could send you to a completely different world within. Each image is like a Russian doll of different areas and images. At some point, however, you will reach a dead end, where you can no longer go forward, or where going back is blocked. Here, you may find a thought bubble you cannot click on, or a doorway that you cannot go through. Dragging the picture from one of the four panels to another will reveal that there is an image underneath yours, a cutout where that doorway or thought bubble windowed an image underneath, and suddenly you have two images to explore. Here is where the main game opens up, where you will be tasked with trying to find how to either connect different images, collapse them into one, or divide images up to four. Functionally, the game's goal is what shifts, where the rules themselves stick to one of these few rules of exploring images, separating images, or collapsing images.
The overarching objective is to help a young boy in collecting five orb-like objects and putting them in a bowl. The boy explores a mostly war-torn world that often jumps between different periods, from during the war, after the war, and early stages of rebuilding. The boy will look for doors to walk through, or will require you to line up panels to walk between them. The trick in getting this done is in understanding where architecture lines up between the images. Sometimes an image can have one type of architecture to its left side, and another to its right, allowing it multiple connections that must be sequenced properly in order to get the boy where he needs to go.
Explaining the game is difficult because of how the game utilizes form. Gorogoa wants you to think about the images in front of you, making connections between the images to make changes that allow you to explore more. This can be as simple as lining two images next to one another in the panels as stated before to allow the boy to travel from one image to the other, or as complex as lining up gear-like objects with gear-like architecture in order to rotate objects in different images. The complexity of the interplay between panels lends itself to showing rather than telling, and explaining any of these puzzles is worse than just leaking the air out of what makes this game great, rather amounting to a tedious description of architecture and surreal imagery. That is to say, this isn't a game that is fun to talk about, but the reason it isn't fun to discuss is precisely what makes it so effective. There is an intuition the game plays on, that same pattern recognition that allows for you to know the rules of a puzzle when you see it, but in the inverse. Often times, you don't know exactly what you are aiming to do, just that patterns are making themselves apparent and you want to see where these connections lead. This sense of pattern exploration effectively plays on the game's themes of past horror and reflection. You want to see how things connect, and the most satisfying moments in the game are often where you finally get to where all four panels collapse into one, your stresses of juggling several micro-worlds becoming a place of rest.
The boy in Gorogoa wants to find five orbs in order to call some odd cosmic God, a metaphor for making sense of horror through reflection. Collapsing panels is paramount to being able to compartmentalize whole chunks of history into something linear and digestible, and the separation of frames trying to piece apart what the mind boggles to understand. The game's depth is less than its resonance, a game about the emotional journey through one's past without necessarily benefiting from analysis, a puzzle about exploring connections without much in the way of formal rules or complexity therein. It's a game that asks to be played and felt, not thought about. And there is something special about that.
8.0
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