I interpreted it as a metaphor for uncovering a family history – understanding that the narrative of ancestry does not always occur in a linear fashion, but rather learning one fact can unlock the door to learning another, shedding more and more information until a beautiful, complete tapestry appears. The story can seem nebulous to some, but it’s more a tale of emotions and feelings rather than plot and structure. The puzzles are also heavily laden in symbolism, adding an extra layer of meaning to every action. Getting to the orb, however, is where the joy is found: by picking up and moving each image the player can manipulate the world and build impossible passageways through space and time – and the answer is never what you’d expect. Levels appear intuitive at first: the goal is always to guide your main character to a coloured orb, so he can add it to his collection. Since the world can interlink and fold onto itself depending on how you move your individual frames, the puzzles are quite purely playful – moving pictures around to see how they fit together will eventually unlock your passage further into the game. Gorogoa’s puzzles largely task the player with recognising patterns and making connections between two otherwise unrelated pictures. It’s helped by the Switch’s touch screen which, while a little too small to display every detail in the game’s graphics, allows a more tactile control scheme which allows the player to touch, feel and move the game’s various pieces as they see fit. It’s a game drawing inspiration not from other games, but rather different mediums such as comics, physical card games and paintings, and as a result it feels like playing a work of art. Gorogoa's puzzles never feel like obstacles to overcome one at a time – they are the means by which the story is told.Gorogoa arrives through a long and arduous development process, taking over five years of idea revisions and rewrites until it reached a state which developer Jason Roberts was satisfied with. Between and even during the process of solving a puzzle I often found myself reading Gorogoa like a book or admiring it like you would a painting, allowing its collection of detailed landscapes, cluttered homes, and ancient artifacts to take on new meanings over time until its story became a living, breathing thing rather than just a serviceable plot. Lavish palaces stand tall over the crumbling ruins of a city. Images of war and destruction juxtapose scenes of great wealth and royalty. It is Gorogoa’s biggest, most fulfilling puzzle to piece together: you help guide a young boy on his quest to collect fruits for a majestic yet terrifying beast, but for what purpose is not immediately known. “Like nearly all puzzle games Gorogoa’s imaginative puzzles sadly lose that initial spark of excitement after you learn their tricks, but its ambiguous and somber story warrants more than one playthrough, as late-game revelations lend insightful new context to its early moments. In this way, every exciting step in my journey also became a startling revelation about Gorogoa’s captivating mythology - small moments that play towards a larger, more intricate whole. I found myself reaching far into the past and out into distant lands to enact change on the present - a clever mechanism that fuels the fresh and magical interactions behind each puzzle and acts as a bittersweet meditation on memory and loss. In these puzzles time and space aren’t bound by the laws of physics, allowing old and new to merge into a singular moment. In another, I guided a character through a series of framed photographs by stacking doorways, rotating ancient ruins, and slotting the patterns of a porcelain plate into a floating cog. In one sequence, I stole the glow of a distant star to light a lantern. But as you explore, rearrange, and stack its panels - sometimes stripping layers off one image to create two distinct ones - its disjointed vignettes, symbols, and scenes start to come together in increasingly surprising ways.
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