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Gorogoa, by Jason Roberts is an interactive puzzle game. It is also a meditation on the passage of time, on the human condition, and the meaning of a life.  Originally conceived as a graphic novel, and rendered in hundreds of beautifully hand-drawn pictures by the game designer, it’s the story of a boy who sees a mythical beast in a war-torn land and spends his life trying to understand its secrets. You play as reader of this story and co-author, solving puzzles to move the character along his journey.  Gorogoa’s win condition is satisfied when all of the puzzles are solved, and narratively, the boy/man has uncovered the secrets he’s chasing. The only other outcome is that there are puzzles remaining to be solved. 

The game is played on a 2x2 square.  Each quadrant can hold a picture tile which can be shifted, overlaid onto another tile, joined and separated from other tiles, and finally zoomed into and away from. Using elements of time, space, inversion of the macro and the micro, metaphor, congruence, and visual pun, the puzzle solutions require to the player to manipulate the pictures on the tiles and the objects contained in them to reframe, recontextualize and make abstract connections. To play the game, a player can make one of two basic moves, either moving the tile from one square to another, or clicking on a picture element or directional arrow within a tile. The player cannot physically move any object within a tile, but character and object movement is triggered from the correct association of the objects in the tiles - when tiles are either overlaid, or juxtaposed horizontally or vertically.  An example of this is an archway in one picture tile which is left behind when the tile is moved. This archway becomes a transparent overlay for an implied door in another picture, which then opens. Another example is a train-track depicted on a map, stylized to appear like a ladder, which when placed properly functions as an actual ladder allowing the character to ascend in another tile.  The resources, in the form of what the tiles can do and what connections can be made are not immediately known to the player. Though exploring the different tiles, and how they might move and relate, the game continually unveils new ways the tiles may be used, and increasingly clever mechanisms that relate the tiles.  The "ludus" (Callois, 141) of strict tile manipulation boundaries provides a nice balance of constraint, while the player's investigative process promotes gradual loosening of those constraints with novel tile functionality. In so doing the game succeeds in “capturing the player’s interest with an attractive goal, teaching the player the rules in a seamless and interesting way, giving feedback during gameplay that keeps the player engaged, and rewarding the player appropriately at the end” (Fullerton, 39). Gorogoa exemplifies what I believe is an essential ingredient in sustaining interest in puzzle games and learning games - or any learning activity - in general. 

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Gorogoa is full of incidental learning, or at least opportunity for reflection. The stunning art, architecture and iconography in Gorogoa references ancient civilizations. In some scenes these things are in shambles, decimated by the pointlessness of war. This is where the game is a meditation on the triumph of the human spirit. Here, the character you lead is crippled or blind, a personification of the world around him, and yet through even these circumstances, you lead him to persevere towards his goals. The ancient figures that are sometimes employed to aid you in your quest are usually performing difficult labour. The tasks they perform are recontextualized to “move” elements within other tiles. Incidentally, this “skin”,  allows the player to learn and appreciate, through metaphor, that our world was largely built through arduous manual labour, and to see how it was all done to support the movement (and relative lack of manual labour) most of us freely enjoy.  


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The boundaries restricting player movement to tile manipulation and very limited clicking on the pictures on the surface might seem to lead to a simple player experience. However, it is not possible to solve the puzzles by randomly shifting tiles and clicking on things. Each puzzle has a sequence and a distinct logic that is seldom replicated in other puzzles. The game play is to find and facilitate the connections in seemingly unrelated elements, to see things beyond what they appear to be, and fashion a world of interconnectivity which has one function, to support the journey of the boy/man through his life. In this way, we are in effect playing out a Buddhist cosmology and philosophy of sunyata, which is simultaneously the concept that nothing exists independently of anything else, and also that nothing exists the way we think it does. It is a world of relative constructed “truths.” The fun in this play, is to learn to see - in fact require yourself to see - beyond what you normally see.

Works cited

Fullerton, T. (2014). Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovation Games, NY: Taylor & Francis

Caillois, R. The Definition of Play and the Classification of Games. In K. Salen and E. Zimmerman (Eds.) The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (pp. 122-155)