Gorogoa is an indie sliding-tile puzzle game developed and illustrated by Jason Roberts and published by Annapurna Interactive on December 14, 2017 for Steam, Nintendo Switch and iOS. Versions for Playstation 4 and Xbox One followed on May 22, 2018, with those for Android and Kindle Fire not long after.
One day, a majestic rainbow-colored dragon appears within a nameless town. A young boy, his curiosity piqued by the sight, reads up on the creature and finds that the dragon can be appeased by offering a bowl containing five differently-colored fruits. And so, having found the bowl in his home's closet, he sets out to seek the fruits that will summon the dragon.
What follows is a tale of tragedy and lost innocence as the dragon seeker comes to grips with the price of his journey.
This game contains the following tropes:
- All for Nothing: Even with all the boy went through to find the fruits, the dragon refuses the offer and casts him down for his unbalanced ambition.
- Anachronic Order: The game jumps constantly between the protagonist's journey to obtain the five fruits and his increasingly older self struggling with the fallout of his labors being for naught.
- Coming of Age Story: Ultimately, the story is less about the dragon and more about the protagonist being humbled by his experiences living through a near-fatal accident, a calamity that ravaged his town, and everything that happened after.
- The Atoner: Invoked. At one point the protagonist tries to atone for his perceived sins by engaging in various religious rituals. Sadly, even such rigorous trials are not enough to ease his suffering.
- Doomed Hometown: Midway through the game's timeline, the protagonist's town suffers heavily from an unknown calamity, presumed to be either a great war or a natural disaster. Even though it survives, the scars are still felt throughout.
- Foreshadowing: In the original demo - unlockable by beating the game - the image of the prophecy that starts the whole story depicts the five fruits being offered by two boys. In the full game, the two figures are instead a boy and an old man, implying just how long the boy's story is going to turn out to be - and that that may very well be have been the point all along...
- Innocence Lost: As the scenes of our protagonist's post-quest life show, being rejected by the dragon was only the tip of the iceberg of suffering he endured.
- MacGuffin: The five fruits are what the boy seeks to offer to the dragon so that he may behold its glory.
- Mental Time Travel: One possible interpretation of how the protagonist is able to travel throughout different times of his life to obtain the fruits is that he is reminiscing about his past mistakes and folly in pursuing the dragon, projecting himself as his younger, more innocent self.
- Mind Screw: Amidst the game bouncing between the timeline freely, the highly allegorical nature of the dragon, and the complex gameplay, analyzing the story is no easy task.
- Nameless Narrative: Fitting in with Silence Is Golden below, neither of the key characters are named nor is the boy's town.
- Pilgrimage: In the quest for the fourth fruit, the scenes from the protagonist's life that cam be visited by zooming in on the religious artifacts on the table appear to be memories of a pilgrimage:
- The bell: the protagonist is crossing a desert, and rings a bell when he passes a shrine.
- The ladle: the protagonist is climbing a mountain, and anoints himself with holy water when he passes a shrine.
- The candle: the protagonist is pushing a wheelbarrow through a forest and lights a candle when he passes a shrine.
- Our Dragons Are Different: The game's centerpiece is an Eastern-style dragon brightly colored in various hues and bearing scales reminiscent of exotic fish and corals.
- Scenery Porn: The art style is strikingly naturalistic and lavishly detailed, leading to some gorgeous setpieces such as the boy's journey for the yellow fruit and the fallout of the carnage the town suffers later in his life.
- Secret Test of Character: The ending can be interpreted as the boy ultimately collecting the five true fruits - the five phases of his life, with his natural death as an old man completing the final 'fruit' and the entire offering.
- Silence Is Golden: Not a single word is spoken throughout the game, with even the text rendered in asemic glyphs.
- Sizeshifter: At one point the boy's path to the purple fruit is blocked by some piles of garbage. To bypass it you must use the tiles and some perspective trickery to shrink him to fit through a tiny opening and then unshrink him so he can enter the tower.
- Yank the Dog's Chain: After much effort the boy finally finds the five fruits and offers them up to the dragon, coming face to face with its eye. Then the dragon closes it and fades away, leaving the boy distraught. Worse, he is immediately cast down and crippled for his ignorance, and his town suffers a great calamity.
