![]() Even by the end, I was still none the wiser. Without dialogue or basic storytelling, it’s difficult to say what exactly the game is really about. Gorogoa begins with a strange creature flying around a city, and a young boy who seems to want to find it and communicate with it. I particularly like them when they’re part of a story-based game, such as the old Broken Sword games or some of the older survival horror titles (I will never forget solving that piano puzzle in the original Silent Hill), but Gorogoa isn’t really either of those. Stu might think that Gorogoa is magick but I’d say that it’s language.I like a good puzzle, despite not being very good at them. ![]() You just have accept that you’re in for a ride, that you’ll be treated to an experience, and that there’s nothing you can do to prepare except set aside an hour and put on a decent pair of headphones. With the exception of a small number of timing puzzles there’s really not even a need to be particularly dexterous. Gorogoa doesn’t care if you can read or even really in what language. All games, to an extent, rely on the player developing a fluency or familiarity with its systems but this usually also asks that you bring in a general knowledge of how games work or a set of skills (memorization, reflexes) that have been cultivated elsewhere. The best part is that learning how to Gorogoa doesn’t really necessitate any particular level of outside skill. There will not be any eureka moments, there is just the slow methodical learning curve of an experience expertly tuned to make you learn it. There will be challenges and times when it will frustrate you. You begin by walking before you begin to trot. It advances in its complexity slowly until you reach mastery. ![]() To play Gorogoa and finish it is to have learned the language of Gorogoa, a game constantly in conversation with itself. To proceed you have to slowly become more fluent in the visual language of the game. While Gorogoa is full of red herrings and dead ends these are not without lessons and merit. Each image is not, a singular piece, it’s a piece on top of a piece. You move a piece on a whim to discover that there are layers to each image. Then something happens, you’ve done well. ![]() You line up two pictures next to each other because they look like they go together. There’s no hints or ways to buy them, there is just Gorogoa. You proceed by doing, learn by doing, succeed by doing. There’s no words, no explicit rules or goals. A series of hand drawn puzzles that ask you to just sort of try things. Here though, I’ll pull you through my decidedly more readerly one. You can, and should, read Stu’s letter in the magazine about his rather spiritual experience with Gorogoa. I made it about two thirds through when my “no new game” policy was scuttled by Stu Horvath and Gorogoa. When you’ve got great games like Persona 5 and Final Fantasy XV sitting around in their original factory wrapping you don’t really need much more than that. I wanted to go the whole month just playing things I already owned, expensive things I already owned. At the beginning of the month, I committed myself to making it through January without buying any videogames. ![]()
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