Gorogoa

A man spends his life attempting to appease the god Gorogoa, drawing from his past experiences in an attempt to understand how.

Gorogoa is a beautifully crafted puzzle game by the independent creator Jason Roberts. The game takes place in a picturesque watercolour and pencil world, linked through time by the memories of the main character. This results in an environment that can only be described as dreamlike.

It is hard to say exactly who you, the player, controls throughout the game. You never interact directly with the boy/man, instead effecting the world around him in order to allow him to advance.
As the story progresses, you begin to question whether you are actually controlling the main character’s memories of events, filling in the blanks when he either wasn’t sure what had happened or had simply forgotten.

You navigate the 2.5D world through (up to) 4 panels, each representing either a point in the characters life or an abstract thought connecting one point to another. Early on in the game, these panels line up easily, giving a clear idea of where the boy must go and how to gather his gifts for Gorogoa. As you move through the story; the panels become more intimate, the concepts more detailed. The panels continue to line up, but now you’re required to think more abstractly about how. The answers can lie in a memory of a book the boy had as a child, or in the thought he had to distract him while he was forced to live through a war.

This game is the purest form of puzzle game. As the boy grows into a man, so too does your understanding of how to navigate not just the world, but his memories and thoughts to. Puzzles from earlier in the game are repeated with new elements, becoming harder and longer, and yet you recognize that they are built on the foundation of what you have already learned.

It is this sense of learning and growth that makes me believe this is a great game. By the end, you have begun to see the character’s world through mature eyes. Where at the beginning of the game you could tap the first thing you saw and be led through the adventure, by the end you’re really considering every element of the frame, looking for the clue that makes sense. Some panels may even line up physically and not work, only for you to require an element from earlier in the story; like a book off the childhood bookshelf, or a shelf shaken by gunfire in a war-torn city.

Gorogoa is beautiful game, both in how it looks and the story it tells.
It truly is great.