![]() When I was recovering from a heart disease, getting really, really invested in League of Legends esports helped me feel like I was part of a community. It’s so isolating, and I can absolutely relate to the ways video games help me feel more connected. There’s been a period of time in my life where I’ve been very sick, and stuck at home for six months to a year. Chronic illness is hard - really, really hard. Thank you for sharing your story with us. ![]() Thanks Polygon, and as we all love to say, keep on gamin’ in the free world. It’s nice to live in someone else’s story when there isn’t much going on in your own anymore. So I suppose I just want to know what games left big narrative impacts on you! What games provided characters and plotlines that left you enormously invested in a whole other world, even if only for a short while. If anyone knows about this kind of hidden gem, it’s Polygon Dot Com. I do worry how many incredible video game stories out there get overlooked, that find innovative ways to get across beautiful moving narratives and yet fly under the radar for all but a dedicated few. When I’m too out-of-it to engage with some Hardcore Gamer Gameplay, I love having the door open for a short little indie game that is devoted to using the medium in interesting ways to tell its own unique story (many of which I’ve discovered through Polygon, I suspect lots of you share my taste on this one). I’ve got good at managing it, but I can’t deny how truly isolating, and quite honestly boring it’s forced my life to become.īut no matter how many years go by, and how many plans and hobbies I’m forced to drop, it never becomes any less of a treat to live in a video game narrative for a little while. ![]() We’ll see.I’m many years into a period of chronic illness, which threw my life off the rails right in the prime of my young adulthood. Some day I hope to remaster that original version and get it working in the new engine, and make it available if I get the sense people are interested. Puzzles in the demo were dropped from the design not because I didn’t like them, but because there was no longer a place for them.Īt this point, to me, the original demo is almost separate work. Over and over, I’d make one design change, and that change would have ripples that would force other changes throughout the game. Balancing these constraints forced a lot of cuts over the years. Every part has to serve the whole, the pacing has to feel right, the puzzles have to feel good and be varied and interweave with the story. Roberts: I’ve never been shy about cutting stuff from the design, even things I’ve put a lot of work into. What was your process for deciding what you kept? And how many puzzles did you lose along the way? RPS: Along with so much brand new stuff, there are a lot of moments that we saw in the earlier builds and demos that haven’t made it into the final game. Gorogoa's clever gameplay tricks and gorgeous, hand-drawn art will stay with you for a long time. Like those kinds of art, Roberts' creation stands out because it absolutely works as a "play it again" dive into spirituality, loss, and rebirth. At the end of six years of development, Roberts has produced a little over two hours of gameplay.īut that's like saying your favorite illustrated book is only 24 pages or your favorite children's movie is only 70 minutes. It is that suspended place, between confusion and understanding, reality and impossibility, that makes Gorogoa so bewitching and enticing. Its impossible logic made so much sense, its undimensional structure somehow coherent, so long as you allow yourself to float between the solving and the unsolving. ![]() ![]() More than anything, the feeling that dominated throughout was one of magic. And it is also the emotional landscape that the art slowly builds around you, a place where everyone is careworn but just about bearing up, where the huge forces that knock people about have not completely eroded these people's sense of curiosity. It's the art itself, of course, which is detailed but never fussy, intricate but always readable and strangely calm, taking players to some distant environment in which fantasy and reason do not seem to be at odds. But it's not just the mechanical cleverness that marks this thing out - not just the feat of cosmic paper-engineering that sees distant stars landing on living room tables or a crackling hearth fire engaging in all kinds of temporal shenanigans. Gorogoa is a masterpiece, I think - in its unusualness, its invention, in the way it boldly walks its own distinct path, this is the kind of game you set your watch by. ![]()
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