Gorogoa
Solve miniature mysteries through beautiful artwork
$4.99 From Jason Roberts, gorogoa.com Made for iPhone, iPad Needs iOS 9.3.5 or later Every now and again, a puzzle game comes along that changes what puzzle games can be. It was like that with The Room on iOS — a super high-quality, beautiful puzzle-box experience that took escapethe-room games and elevated them to something gourmet. Gorogoa is one of those games. It is, all at once, a puzzle game, a storybook, a comic book, and a painting; it manages to be all these things in one beautiful package in a way that’s so effortless, it’s remarkable it hadn’t existed before.
The main concept is that there are four square panels, which you can move around and overlap at will. Sometimes, one of these panels will have a doorway, and by moving the panel with the doorway and lining it up with a doorway in another panel, you can create paths through different worlds. Other times, the panels will have a lantern, and the goal is to find something to layer behind the lantern to make it light up; or perhaps it’s a stained glass window missing its interior.
These puzzles mean that as you play, you are always on the lookout for matching patterns, secret doors, details, and things-that-look-likeother-things, such as a cogwheel and a sun.
It’s not an easy game to figure out, especially when it gets to the later stages and there are far more than four scenes to sort through, as you zoom in and out of each one. Patterns match up, but you’re not sure why, and it’s only five steps later that you realize what’s supposed to happen. But however bemused you might get, it doesn’t ever feel like you’re stuck, because each scene is a tiny diorama, a mystery in miniature — whether it’s a boy pushing a wheelbarrow through a forest, or ringing a bell in front of the city walls, or a strange, sinister dragon winding its way through the story like a crocodile stalking its prey through the reeds.
The art in Gorogoa — thousands of scenes of it — is all hand-drawn by the developer, Jason Roberts. That’s what gives it the look of a storybook — that, and the repeated motifs of intricate symmetry and Islamicinspired patterns that make Gorogoa look like an old religious text. It’s not surprising that Gorogoa was seven years in the making. What is surprising is that it feels like it’s always existed.
The bottom line. Gorogoa is a masterpiece of detail and wonder that is so much more than just a puzzle game.