5/11/2023 0 Comments Gorogoa meaning"Over time, I've preferred the idea that the scenes actually work as part of a story," Roberts said. Roberts felt strongly that the game needed a story so that the scenes had a purpose beyond accommodating puzzles. I didn't get a firm handle on what was going on in my short demo, but I could tell that it was planting seeds for further plot development, even if the game has no text or narration to guide the player along. The art is fairly abstract, but there actually is a narrative happening in Gorogoa. ![]() "When two tiles join together, I want them to feel like the miraculous transcending the ordinary," Roberts said." Once you figure it out, though, it's pretty special. I had to zoom in and out as the rock was rolling to get it to its destination, which introduced an element of timing that I never thought I'd see in this game. In one instance, by correctly adjusting the zoom levels on three entirely separate tiles and aligning them in the right way, I was able to roll a rock down a set of hills. The extent to which some scenes can be zoomed in on or out from is impressive, and it frequently introduced new concepts I would never have expected. "In order to test that a puzzle works, I have to take the art to a certain point."Įven in the half hour or so that I played Gorogoa, I was constantly surprised by the depth of the puzzles. "Since the puzzles are all about pictures fitting together, it's much more difficult to separate the puzzles from the art design," Roberts said. That means the puzzle design and the art are inextricable, which makes testing difficult. He didn't set out to do the most difficult thing possible he's just more adept with a pencil than with digital art tools. If we can accept these qualities, we’ll all have richer futures for it.Each scene is hand-drawn in pencil by Roberts, which explains why Gorogoa has been in development for several years. The only way to push the boundaries of what is acceptable and what isn’t in games is to take games like Gorogoa and follow along its lines of expectation and become open to it. Gorogoa is invested in expanding our horizons as players of games, and much like an experimental film, novel, or comic, we should take it at its word. The joy of Gorogoa is that its narrative is simple and ambiguous.Įchoing some of the words of James Earl Cox III from last week, whose game You Must Be 18 Or Older To Enter was removed from Steam, what we should be looking for and championing are works that stretch and distort our expectations of what games should be. Both detractors and supporters agree that it doesn’t do enough, and it seems to me that both of those ideas miss the point to some degree. Kyle Hilliard at Game Informer stresses the beauty of the game while saying that it ultimately made him feel nothing, and Sam Machkovech at Ars Technica loved it while mourning the lack of a longer, more elaborate story. This mode of game design isn’t for everyone. You experience it, and you think about it, and you reflect on it until it fades from memory. You solve puzzles to get those fruits and to confront the reality of that beast, but there is no simple panel-pushing solution to “solving” the narrative. ![]() Those fruits are symbolically tied to a great, monstrous beast that either preserves or destroys civilization. ![]() It doesn’t beat you over the head with meaning or interpretation. And, wonderfully, it’s incredibly unclear about what that reflection means.
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