#GOROGOA REVIEW SERIES#

#GOROGOA REVIEW SERIES#

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. Scattered and mysterious in their disconnection, this stage of each puzzle feels like a story told in the logic of dreams, as alluring as it is elusive.īut 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. Other scenes sprawl across two interlocking panels into wide landscapes or cluttered interior shots you can then click to pan through or zoom into to reveal new, sometimes much darker moments hidden just out of sight of the original perspective: a destroyed city, a gutted toy in a pile of rubble, a glyph of meteors raining down on a temple. These moments are sometimes compact and ordinary: an apple hanging from a branch a lantern on a pile of dusty books a compass a map a photograph. When first laid out, each set of seemingly unrelated images looks like random pages torn from an abstract comic or a child’s storybook.

This fleeting tale takes about one to two hours to complete, but its absorbing and ambiguous story - an elegant exploration of spirituality in its most beautiful and destructive forms - will stay with you for a long time after. Even the most static scenes burst with life, and when rearranged create new dynamics that reveal a fascinating dual nature (mysterious, sad, and even a little frightening) as panels merge together in exciting and satisfying ways.

But as you scroll, stack, layer, and zoom in or out of each scene, you get the feeling that the world inside each box is too vast and magical to be contained.

It’s quiet and reflective: four drag-and-droppable panels act as small windows into a beautiful and dreamlike hand-drawn universe. I’ve never played a puzzle game quite like Gorogoa.

Gorogoa review