Sometimes a solution has to do with timing, other times you may have to zoom back away a few times to accomplish something before returning to proceed. I discovered that there’s an on/off button in the main menu (hidden until I tried to pause my game) that allows you to enable a hotspot highlighter that displays all the active objects in a given panel, but even with this feature turned on, sometimes I still couldn’t always work out what I was supposed to be doing because the possibilities within just these four interconnected squares alone are far from limited. It is the process of figuring out what to do, with no instructions given, that presents the challenge. In hindsight, the puzzles are actually very simple, yet they’re extraordinarily clever when actually confronting them. But after a while, it becomes exciting to encounter new places and new kinds of shifts from panel to panel – maybe through a star we click on in a night sky, or maybe through newspaper clippings you'll never know so it’s always a delightful surprise. These scene transitions, although smooth and visually pleasing, might be a bit confusing at the beginning, especially as you’re still adjusting to recognizing patterns and processing the story at the same time.
Try zooming back out to the bookshelves, however, and you may find that, no, now that you’ve arrived in this new mysterious location, you can’t go anywhere until you find what’s important in this ‘part’ of the panel.
#Game gorogoa windows#
Zoom into those buildings behind the hills, then zoom into their windows to see a man at his desk zoom into his bookshelf, zoom into the illustrations on his book spines, and now you have landed in an entirely different world. At times it really is like passing through several worlds in a row. Zooming in and out of illustrations is one of, if not the most magical recurring experiences in Gorogoa. A ‘finger’ cursor will appear to highlight interactive objects to click on, while the ‘move’ cursor indicates that you can slide the panel somewhere else. This includes moving to an adjoining room within a single scene, zooming in and out, sliding an entire panel to an empty square or even dragging it over top of another panel. There are actually only a few ways to manipulate the panels, because that’s all your pointers are able to do. For example, when you zoom into one square, the illustration on that panel may become connected to the one above it to form, let’s say, a cohesive ladder, and your character then proceeds to climb up the ladder, magically moving to another panel! With the right combination, sometimes an animation is triggered, which grants you access to a new panel area. Each panel can be used both on its own and in conjunction with the others. The puzzle system is presented within the boundaries of a simple four-panel window – it’s like a comic layout design, but without any definitive order. The whole experience feels like a set of interconnecting gears set in motion, though not always moving events forward in time. What’s interesting is that the storyline dances back and forth from past to future, continually transporting us from dreams to reality and back. Experienced wordlessly and entirely in the form of a puzzle, the narrative is mainly divided into five chapters, one for each color of the fruit he must collect to complete his offering for Gorogoa, the mythical beast. A young boy’s curiosity leads him to thoroughly research the otherworldly being, which becomes a lifelong struggle spanning his childhood to his elderly years. Gorogoa centers on the search for a dragon.
You can appreciate the amount of craftsmanship that has clearly gone into creating each tile-based puzzle seeping through the carefully-drawn illustrations, and with each chapter you complete, you’ll be further blown away by this magical assortment of sequential art and optical illusions. Although the game has nothing to do with being a magician, its seamlessly integrated visual design allows you create something new and unexpected out of two seemingly unrelated images, which is like being shown a magic trick and unraveling its secrets at the same time. You know how in magic tricks, the illusionist uses sleight of hand to amaze you, like taking a coin out of your ear, perhaps? Well, solving the puzzles in Jason Roberts’s short but thoroughly unique Gorogoa might feel a little bit like that.
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