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| − | Gorogoa, by Jason Roberts is an interactive puzzle game. It is also a meditation on the passage of time, beauty, and the meaning of a life. Originally conceived as a graphic novel, and rendered in beautifully hand-drawn by the game designer, it’s the story of a boy who sees a mythical beast in a war torn land and becomes an adult and an old man trying to understand its secrets. In fact, you play as reader of this story and co-author. Characters don’t not move of their own volition. It is only when a puzzle is solved, or on it’s way to being solved that a path is paved for the characters to move and the game progresses. 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.
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| − | The game is played on a 2x2 square. Each quadrant can hold a picture tile which can be shifted, overlayed onto another tile, joined and separated from other tiles, and zoomed into and away from. The puzzles are not at all conventional. Using elements of time, space, inversion of the macro and the micro, metaphor, congruence, and visual pun, the 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 something within a tile. The player cannot physically move any object, but character movement is triggered from the correct association of the objects in the tiles, either overlaid, or juxtaposed horizontally or vertically. An example of this an archway in one picture is left behind when the tiles 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 functioned as an actual ladder allowing the character to ascend. 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.
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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 mediation on 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 times and clicking on things. Each puzzle has a sequence and a distinct logic that is seldom replicated in other puzzles. It's highly engaging 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.
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