Gorogoa is a beautiful puzzle game that focuses on great art, powerful storytelling, and emotional music. Its art-based approach to puzzles and gameplay provides a totally unique experience that's like nothing else on the market

Gorogoa is an incredibly unique game that's totally unlike any other puzzle game on the market. In Gorogoa, you pinch, zoom, and slide pictures to solve a number of puzzles that revolve around collecting colored fruits. The act of pinching, zooming, and sliding serves as both a way for you to explore the beautiful, evocative artwork in Gorogoa and to solve the puzzles themselves. You can match two pictures side-by-side or vertically to allow a character or object to move between scenes, lift objects from a scene to form a new image, or drop an image on top of another one to allow a character or object to pass through an opening and create a new tableau.

The resulting gameplay is equal parts exploration and problem-solving. In Gorogoa, your first approach to any problem usually involves plenty of time scrolling around the artwork and appreciating the intricate details. You'll find lots of opportunities to interact with images, reposition things, and manipulate the game's four panels in new ways to produce an entirely fresh set of images. Making progress won't always be fast, but the task of fiddling around and figuring out what you need to do to solve the puzzle is wonderful and enjoyable on its own.

Gorogoa has a handful of clever tricks that it uses to keep its unique, almost alien gameplay approachable. For starters, a plethora of sound and music cues give you hints when you're on the right track. The music remains somber and moody while you're exploring fruitlessly, lifting up into powerful melodies stuffed full of emotion when you begin to manipulate the right elements. The game also features lots of parallel puzzles, ensuring that once you've figured out a trick you'll get to use it several times in short succession to reach your in-game goals. Finally, a hint mode adds small rings around interactable elements when you first load a picture. These hints won't tell you how to solve puzzles. Instead, they tell you what your tools are so you can begin trying various combinations and move towards your objectives.

Gorogoa is not a long game. It's difficult enough that you should get an hour or three out of it if you avoid spoilers and walkthroughs. The middle section of the game is significantly more difficult than the beginning or end, meaning you're likely to encounter a bit of frustration once you've settled into the game. That said, the fundamental experience of exploring the game and experimenting with solutions is quite fun, so you're far less likely to be tempted to perform online research than you might be with other games. Completing the game is totally worth it in terms of story payoff, so if you do decide that you're totally stuck it's definitely worth looking up a walkthrough so you can finish the game.