NOCLIP Pocket E72 - Poisoned My Brain - Gorogoa

Podocasta. Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re talking about Gorogoa, a puzzle game centered around manipulating the four discrete sections of the screen to progress. While not being too difficult a game, as many dedicated puzzle games tend to be, the depth comes from the sheer number of creative ways they use the core conceit. You can shift quadrants around, which can sometimes uncover additional tiles, create a transparent layer to overlay on another tile, or align two tiles showing disparate scenes into a single image. Add to that the ability to zoom in and out, with different levels of detail having entirely different functions within the puzzle, and it creates a huge number of possible actions for the player to take at any time. The game is plenty interesting from a mechanical standpoint, but the game’s art style feels unique as well and serves as its other main selling point. Because of the level of detail necessary to make the puzzles function, the visual design of the game has a more traditionally “artistic” quality to it, almost feeling like the illustrations in a book. With a solid use of color and minimal animation really highlighting the points of interest, it helps both communicate the minimalist and somewhat abstract story as well as the puzzles’ solutions to the player. We’re going to be talking about individual puzzles that we thought stood out and made a good use of the game’s mechanics, our interpretation of the games events, and we discuss the proper way to use an eldritch monstrosity. Thank you for joining us again today! It’s pretty rare we talk about puzzle games, but this one caught our eye for whatever reason and seemed to fit well in the schedule to give it a bit of variety. Did you find this game interesting in the ways we did? Was its approachability a positive or a negative for you? Let us know down in the comments or over on our Discord! And hey, while you’re over there, or down there or whatever, why not toss us a few suggestions for Fanbruary? That’s coming up pretty soon. Next time, we’re going to be talking about Hidden Folks, our very first (and depending on how it goes, maybe only) game in the hidden object genre. We hope you’ll join us for that and that you’ll please suggest some games for Fanbruary, please.