I’ve never played a puzzle game quite like Gorogoa. It’s quiet and reflective: four drag-and-droppable panels act as small windows into a beautiful and dreamlike hand-drawn universe. But as you scroll, stack, layer, and zoom in or out of each scene, you get the feeling that the world inside each box is too vast and magical to be contained. Even the most static scenes burst with life, and when rearranged create new dynamics that reveal a fascinating dual nature (mysterious, sad, and even a little frightening) as panels merge together in exciting and satisfying ways. This fleeting tale takes about one to two hours to complete, but its absorbing and ambiguous story — an elegant exploration of spirituality in its most beautiful and destructive forms — will stay with you for a long time after.
When first laid out, each set of seemingly unrelated images looks like random pages torn from an abstract comic or a child’s storybook. These moments are sometimes compact and ordinary: an apple hanging from a branch; a lantern on a pile of dusty books; a compass; a map; a photograph. Other scenes sprawl across two interlocking panels into wide landscapes or cluttered interior shots you can then click to pan through or zoom into to reveal new, sometimes much darker moments hidden just out of sight of the original perspective: a destroyed city, a gutted toy in a pile of rubble, a glyph of meteors raining down on a temple. Scattered and mysterious in their disconnection, this stage of each puzzle feels like a story told in the logic of dreams, as alluring as it is elusive.
But as you explore, rearrange, and stack its panels — sometimes stripping layers off one image to create two distinct ones — its disjointed vignettes, symbols, and scenes start to come together in increasingly surprising ways. In one sequence, I stole the glow of a distant star to light a lantern. In another, I guided a character through a series of framed photographs by stacking doorways, rotating ancient ruins, and slotting the patterns of a porcelain plate into a floating cog. In these puzzles time and space aren’t bound by the laws of physics, allowing old and new to merge into a singular moment. I found myself reaching far into the past and out into distant lands to enact change on the present — a clever mechanism that fuels the fresh and magical interactions behind each puzzle and acts as a bittersweet meditation on memory and loss. In this way, every exciting step in my journey also became a startling revelation about Gorogoa’s captivating mythology — small moments that play towards a larger, more intricate whole.
Gorogoa explores the nature of spirituality, myth, and history with a wordless elegance.
Like nearly all puzzle games Gorogoa’s imaginative puzzles sadly lose that initial spark of excitement after you learn their tricks, but its ambiguous and somber story warrants more than one playthrough, as late-game revelations lend insightful new context to its early moments. It is Gorogoa’s biggest, most fulfilling puzzle to piece together: you help guide a young boy on his quest to collect fruits for a majestic yet terrifying beast, but for what purpose is not immediately known. Images of war and destruction juxtapose scenes of great wealth and royalty. Lavish palaces stand tall over the crumbling ruins of a city. Between and even during the process of solving a puzzle I often found myself reading Gorogoa like a book or admiring it like you would a painting, allowing its collection of detailed landscapes, cluttered homes, and ancient artifacts to take on new meanings over time until its story became a living, breathing thing rather than just a serviceable plot. Gorogoa's puzzles never feel like obstacles to overcome one at a time – they are the means by which the story is told.
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Through its images, Gorogoa explores the nature and intersection of spirituality, mythology, and history – all things that can be messy and personal and hard to confront, but handled here with an impressively wordless elegance. In Gorogoa’s world, the small and nondescript live adjacent to the grand and the magical; not in their shadow, but as part of the very fabric of their reality. There’s a rich splendour woven through even the most mundane of its images, elevating the ordinary into something mystical and wondrous, and grounding its divine mythos into a world startlingly familiar.
