What could have become a frustrating mixture of too many connecting parts never makes that mistake. And then, perfectly, utterly perfectly, it does not. For one tiny moment as I played, I thought it was about to. But would it be intuitive, or would it descend into a bemusing muddle, too many elements to balance at once, too much fiddle and not enough direction? It did feel like it could easily have gone that way. Over the years we've seen and played snippets of Gorogoa, it's always been beautiful - a hand-drawn style of pencils and watercolour, exquisitely well animated. Those are the two most important ingredients here. That's the game at its most simple, before it starts introducing vividly complex - yet somehow always intuitive - interlocking, multi-layered, pan-dimensional gorgeousness. Now perhaps zooming out further from that rooftop you could see a walkway that intersects with yet another image, so you line them side by side, and he walks across. Drag and overlay the archway over the door, and it becomes an entrance to the rooftop, through which the game's protagonist can travel. In another window there might be a domestic room with a doorway on the back wall. For instance, you might have a scene with a tree in one corner, which can be zoomed out from to reveal a rooftop, on which stands an empty archway. The conceit being, a two by two grid of squares, with individual images fitting into each, possible to swap around, overlay, and interconnect, to solve its gentle, astoundingly satisfying puzzles. Its impossibly overlapping world weaves a delicate fiction that stretches beyond the boundaries of its central conceit. It's a beautiful story in which you solve puzzles more by instinct than deduction, and their solutions feel as magical as the process. Gorogoa feels like a sort of magic that might fall apart in the understanding.

Gorogoa review