It's the art itself, of course, which is detailed but never fussy, intricate but always readable and strangely calm, taking players to some distant environment in which fantasy and reason do not seem to be at odds. But it's not just the mechanical cleverness that marks this thing out - not just the feat of cosmic paper-engineering that sees distant stars landing on living room tables or a crackling hearth fire engaging in all kinds of temporal shenanigans.
Gorogoa is a masterpiece, I think - in its unusualness, its invention, in the way it boldly walks its own distinct path, this is the kind of game you set your watch by. Maybe this is how the boy can move from place to place in his quest to track down the fruit that will feed the beast.Īnything more is a spoiler, sadly, and Gorogoa is a short, richly-imagined game that should absolutely not be spoiled. Maybe you can create a kind of coherent landscape from these different parts.
You can create a third building, perhaps, if you can find a promising space to put that empty door frame you now have going spare. And then you lift the image and discover that it is suddenly two images: the door frame comes away in your hand and can be placed elsewhere, while the door itself now exists as part of a different building. Let's say you zoom in, past the boy at his window, and into the cityscape in which he has seen the beast. How do you get so many different images to work with? You start with just one and you discover, through playing, that you can zoom in and out on the detailing and sometimes pan back and forth a little. You have a screen made up of four panels in Gorogoa, and you can slot images into any of these panels, moving them about, putting them together in different ways, seeking out fresh connections and expanded vistas. The art roams exhaustively for inspirations, East and West, secular and sacred. But in fact Gorogoa would only work as a game, where geometry becomes pliable and prone to whimsy, where vectors can be judged and then acted upon, where progress is the only force of nature that cannot be meddled with. The quest is just the friendly shove, of course, the first bit of forward momentum you need for a game that feels like a book, a papercraft puzzle, a sticker album, a crazed unspooling schematic (or even a Mad Magazine fold-in, a peculiar art form in which a crimped creasing of the page allows an image to contain its own parody). The game's quest seems simple, if I have it right: a boy spies a divine beast in the distance and heads off to gather the fruit that will sate it. Gorogoa is drawn by hand and created by - um, I actually have no idea at all how someone could have put this together.
A sun becomes a gear and as a man walks across the earth he turns that sun in the sky! Look at the playful shifts in scale, in perspective, the sheer dance of flatness as distant giants meet nearby minnows in the knowledge that the eye can be trusted to slot it all together. Look at the way it makes you poke at this game's world, imagining a sun that works as a gear, a man who works as a motor. This is Gorogoa, and look at what this simple puzzle - the only one I will really spoil - is doing right here. The teeth of the sun have meshed with the castle now, so as a man walks, his very act of walking turns the sun in the sky - and the sun itself turns.? Gorogoa
A man walks to the right in the foreground, and the castle retreats to the left in the background. Inspired and transporting, this is a game unlike any other.Īt one point, the sun becomes a gear with tooth-like rays that might slot neatly into the crenellations of a nearby castle.
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