7/30/2023 0 Comments Gorogoa first tryPart of why the puzzles are so unsatisfying is because the narrative is too ambiguous. It made it feel like I was just clicking and rearranging things until the next cutscene occurred, instead of solving legitimate puzzles. Instead, when I got stuck, I would just zoom in and out of an image until I found an interactive element of the picture I had simply missed before. All of my careful puzzle arranging rarely led to eureka moments. Unfortunately, moving the images around never amounts to a satisfying puzzle solution. They remind me of my favorite children’s books, and do so without singling out a specific style or artist. These hand-drawn images from artist Jason Roberts are beautiful, and stand out as the highlight. You can connect two alike pictures to make the boy travel between them, for example, or place an image of a train track above another picture to make it act as a ladder. You can take the pictures apart, rearrange them, and even connect them to make larger images. In these images, you see a young boy as he rounds up a collection of different colored fruits in a bowl. Gorogoa’s puzzles are based on a series of hand-drawn images placed on a four-by-four grid. However, I simply did not connect with its vision the narrative is too ambiguous to be engaging, and the simple puzzle mechanics stirred up no emotional response within me. The world of indie games is filled with these kinds of focused experiences, and Gorogoa can certainly be described in this way. More gaming news and updatesĬheck out the latest from Mic, including our deep dive into how female Overwatch players are dealing with online harassment, a cool making-of video for Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and an article about what a Bechdel test for gaming might look like.I appreciate short games built to execute specific, modest concepts. Puzzle game fans should definitely keep their eyes on Gorogoa. The demo was entirely mouse-driven, but I could see it being especially great as a mobile game. Roberts is still finalizing all of the game's art and visual cues, and he mentioned several times during my demo that certain elements were only temporary. Gorogoa doesn't have a firm release date, but it's supposed to come out in 2017. "I want it to be clear, but not too clear." "The player can sense if I'm trying to tell a story that I don't understand," Roberts said. Roberts told me the game will give you more clues as you go along, but some details will still be left to your imagination. Still, don't expect a Mass Effect-style exposition dump at any point. "They don't feel like they're just to justify the puzzles." "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. Each scene is hand-drawn in pencil by Roberts, which explains why Gorogoa has been in development for several years.
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