So...what's this game's story?

[404_Not_Found]

Something about it made me incredibly sad, it seems to tell the story of someone completely possessed by a desire they take their whole life to fulfill, also seems like an allegory for enlightenment. at first I thought maybe I just got a bad ending, but I guess the intent really was exactly this.

Curious what positive takeaways others managed to see in the story? The only one I could find was that the collective experiences we gain through life are where we should look for answers. Not sure if that's reaching though.

[Fien]

I too was left with a feeling of sadness. I played the game twice and the first time I was focussed on the puzzles. The second time I paid more attention to all the little details, which made the story even more confusing for me.

So much is left out that I am not sure I understand what story the developer wanted to tell. It's more of an emotional experience, recognizing something, hard to put into words. I agree with you that the desire to find the creature feels like the boy/man is searching for enlightenment. Especially in the third part, with the many religious symbols, like the candle, bell, images of monks, a rosary, offerings and sacrifices, the boy climbing forever, the mountain. And the frustration when he has achieved nothing and overturns the table.

I have a different interpretation of the ending. The creature refuses the boy's offerings (and by doing so cripples him, I think). In the first picture of the creature the boy finds in the book the bowl is carried by both the boy and the old man, so my guess is the wisdom and insight of the mature self are needed before the offerings are accepted. The old man looks back on his life, sees what went wrong, rearranges pieces, returns the color to the black fruits in a different way. (For instance, the boy got the red fruit just by accident thanks to a bird. The old man gets the color red from the blood of the boy's chains in the book.) He is rewarded by the creature, who fully shows himself for the first time. It made me sad that the old man burns to the sun, like the moth to the flame, and I don't know how to interpret it. Death? Final agony before enlightenment? Symbol of his burning desire?

If you're still reading this thread, I'd be interested in your thoughts.

[Talezteller]

I don't see the old man disappearing as burning up in the sun.

Here's my two cents: the boy sees the creature and reads up on it.
He starts to obsess about giving it gifts, but the creature turns it down, cripples the boy and quite possibly destroys his city/the world (I assume him to be the root cause of all the devastation in some pictures in the last chapter).
As to the old man burning up, I think it's more like achieving peace after coming to terms with your life.
All the last chapter is is the old man going back through his memories and rearranging things. He comes to terms with his experience and rearranges his thoughts, and since at the end we see the boy going through the rest of the book, finding blood and suffering in it, as the last piece needed to complete the puzzle, the old man comes to realize the only way to truly appease the dragon is through pain and surmounting it.
Having the old man gone through this journey of self rediscovery, the dragon now finally accepts its sacrifice and releases him of pain. The old man dies serenely, ascending to some heaven/nirvana type thing.
EDIT: Ultimately I thinkk this is the type of game designed to allow fans to speculate over it forever. Perhaps the creator did not even have a coherent story in mind and just wanted to draw cool ♥♥♥♥, then sort of rearranged it in a way that could be interpreted as a journey.

[Kamamura]

I think that the ambiguity and the unclear nature of the story is a part of the beauty of the game. It's said that great art is only a torso, requiring the spectator to add a part of himself to complete the piece, aand this is a perfect example. It means slightly different thing for different people, precisely because people are different. So here is my interpretation:

I agree with all of the above, the main theme is certainly the journey through life, and seeking life's purpose, or ascension of sorts. The great beast IMO symbolises the time, with its five distinct colors meaning stages of life, from youth (red) to ripe old age (violet). Seeing the glimpse of the Beast, the young boy starts studying the world around him, which ultimately propels him on the path of ambition - we see the theme of climbing, striving, and ultimately ascending a high tower where the colors are put together to form a lifelong dream or ambition - but as it often happens, ambition makes one blind, and can ultimately result in a disaster instead of a triumh.

We see our protagonist fall, become broken (both physically and metaphorically), we see themes of war, destruction, or perhaps a natural disaster, but also an effort to make amends for the mistakes in life, seeking redemption through religious rite and repentance.

I agree that the last part of the game represents reflection of one's life and his deeds, sometimes puitting them in a different context or bringing a different angle of view. After coming to terms with ones mistakes - or perhaps realizing the ultimate futility of all human efforts, the Best of Time, or perhaps the Samsara cycle of life driven by human desire, fear and ambition, does not avert its gaze this time, and let the protagonist vanish into the growing light, perhaps to be free at last.

[SF]

I think that while the game lends itself to a metaphorical interpretation, it's also just as possible that it's a story that's non-linear and a little lovecraftian It's either about may different people, or the same person, interacting with a creature not of our time and space at what we might call different times and places but to the creature might all occur at the same time and place in the same moment. I lean toward the metaphorical interpretation myself, but it's worth looking at from this angle too.

[Hades ó_ò]

I think the little boy obeys the instructions in the book and tries to reach a realm.
But he was not qualified enough, so he fell from the tower.
After that, he kept searching for the answer and once gave up the idea.
When he was old, he lived a quiet life and finally found happiness.
At the end of his life, he returned to the tower again, recalling the past.
When the memory is over, he has reached that realm.
At this point he finally understood that everything in the world is nothing but an appearance.

[Siricuticu]

I think Fien and Kamamura made a very fine synthesis! Well done!

[Sefu]

Been thinking on this and here's my interpretation. I think you guys helped with yours.

The apple's colors do represent the stages of life, the young boy and old man needing to hold it up together does represent the need of youthful imagination and wisdom through age to live a complete life. But I think the monster, the Gorogoa, represents death itself. And this game is about acceptance of mortality, as well as the dark parts of life itself.

A child does not accept mortality easily. So upon recognizing it, he starts looking for the meaning of life itself and an answer to everything. Thus he reads books (perhaps a symbol of religious scripture) seeking a 'way' through life. He combats this 'thing' in this way, this big beautiful yet dangerous beast that is a mortal life. And he finds, in the end, that gathering the apples - which represent truth in Abrahamic religion and probably represent knowledge/whisdom - is not enough to change the fact that he ages and dies. Breaking his back from falling is merely symbolic of age taking its toll on his body.

Yet in the end, the beast ACCEPTS his offering and embraces him in light like a moth to a flame. Just like we seek truth like a moth to a flame, the reality is we burn up in the end doing it. And in his final moments, he relives past events as one might see their life flash before their eyes.

So is this a positive message or a cynical one? I think it depends what you see in it. I would say the message is a kind of 'memento mori' (remember mortality) and we don't know whether the old man at the end was at peace or simply giving in. That leaves us to decide what we do when we're where he is.

[Sefu]

Incidentally while a lot of people noticed Islamic imagery, some of it seemed Hispanic to me. Anyone know more? I'm thinking of Dia De Los Muertos and figuring the concept of the holiday in a bit.

[veselatorba]

Gorogoa definitely gives a player something to think about.

[mindputty]

I think that the creator of this game, Jason Roberts, really aims to slow things down and make things inward-turning, pensive, thoughtful, meaningful, and spiritual. The actual story of the boy's life only provides a backdrop to the real journey that he travels his entire life - a journey of trying to recapture something that he saw and felt as a child.

Because of the dream-like quality of the story, a memory or experience doesn't represent a single point in time. All parts of the main character's life are overlaid on top of each other, as if there are repeating patterns in his life - from different frames of reference, he is both experiencing these things and recalling and recounting them simultaneously at the same time. In that sense, the story questions what it means to experience something -- is recalling something really any different from experiencing it for the first time, or is it just seeing the same truth from a different perspective, a different layer? Does a life spiral upwards, and when viewed from the top is just a cyclical repetition of the same recurring themes?

From a linear perspective, as a boy, he has a dream, and sees the world with childlike naivete and without a jaded point of view. It is the feeling of wonder and magical possibility that young children believe in or that we all once believed in. Perhaps, as a boy, he literally was on an adventure of his own imagination to find the magical creature, and it was this that actually led to his accident that left him in a wheelchair. As an old man he wants to return to those parts of his life to integrate them all into something that finally makes sense to him - all his life he has been on a journey to see the dragon that he once saw as a child.

At the darkest point of his life, he both recalls his fall when he was younger and what led him to where he is now, while his calendar ominously marks his own planned suicide. At this point, he has already searched for meaning and answers to his own suffering through a kind of empty journey that takes him through the "going through the motions", or religious, approach to spirituality, wherein he climbs mountains, or walks the desert ringing a bell as if on a pilgrimage, doing the acts that the books he reads prescribes in order to connect with the divine (creature).

I think the saddest thing that the character feels throughout his life is that he was once able to see the magical and perhaps the most painful thing to him is the loss of that childlike magical innocence and faith in something more than what the physical world can offer. His journey is about the loss of innocence and faith, the attempt to recapture it, the painful longing felt from being disconnected with it, and something that might be described as "grace" at the ending, where the old man reconnects with the infinite, the sublime, magic, the godhead not by his own doing, but by a kind of reframing of his own relationship to his experiences (integration and acceptance at the end of his life, or a shifting of his own perspective).

With that in mind, I'd say that this is a thoroughly beautiful and hopeful story that doesn't sugarcoat the ugliness of real life, but still offers hope for those who have lived through difficulty and hardship, and that there is the possibility of redemption and a return to innocence.

[Seth]

I agree with a lot here, but I feel a bit different how everything adds up.

So the boy looks in a book, figures out the offering, disregards that it's supposed to be given up by a young boy and an old man, and gives the offering himself. He's knocked off the bell tower as a punishment.

As an old man he recalls this whole story, and is able to reconstruct and renew the offering through his memories. He offers it up, and he BECOMES the creature.

It's at this point we see the boy seeing the creature - the cycle continues. I think this is a repeating style: The creature appears, the boy makes his offering, the man makes his offering, the man becomes the creature and appears to the boy.

Or really, I believe the man creates the creature. The creature is the creation of the man, and the cycle continues indefinitely.

This is how I felt playing this game - the player is like the boy, just doing things without being able to consider the consequences. Moving through life not really making decisions, just moving from one impulse to the next. The decision to make the offering alone clearly isn't what the book dictates, but the boy does it anyway.

It would probably be too much to ask for the game to have a different ending. I was really looking for it - perhaps at the train station, being able to get the old man to get to the tower and meet him there. If only there was a way to rearrange the pieces to make it happen, then the offering could be complete.

But Gorogoa is a journey through memory and dreams to find a solution, but like many dreams, is reoccurring and will not be solved.

[Vilx-]

My take is similar to what others have already said, with some variation. I also suspect that playing the game multiple times and paying attention to more and more details might also make a clearer picture. I've just finished playing it once and I feel like I've barely begun to understand it.

My take is that as a child the man experienced something incredible and awesome. He met something that made him happy and excited and made life seem really joyful and vibrant. A miracle.

But he only caught a glimpse. The feeling soon fled, but he knew he saw something, there was something... Thus began his lifelong quest to find it again. Through the years he gathered pieces of his "puzzle". What those pieces are, I don't know. Seems like the 4 elements (earth, air, fire, water) + "spirit", but what they represent - I don't know. I speculate that they represent some sort of elements of life and human experience. Things like "community" and "belief in self" etc. Or maybe something else. Smells a bit of Buddhism.

And those pieces were gathered by the child in him; the child that still kept alive the memory of that wide-eyed miracle experienced so many years ago...

Anyways, we also see his life's story - when he was still a child, war happened and left him crippled. He is seen using crutches and/or a wheelchair for most of his life. Then he went to study. Later he turned to religion to find answers, and might even have tried several religions, but they didn't give him what he sought after. Slowly he fell into depression and lost his faith in the miracle.

But then, as an old man, he looked back at his life, and through much introspection and thought, he finally understood. He finally found what he was looking for. And soon after, died contently.

[Seelen]

I just finally got to play this amazing game, here is my take on it:

The creature doesnt exist, its just an interpretation of how the MC feels.

It starts with a childlike emotion, something new and marvelous, something out of this world, but that world is shattered by war, you can call it rage of the creature, but thats what I saw, war ravaged the city and crippled the boy.

Then he set himself to find a meaning in life, pilgrimages and such, just desperately trying to heal and find himself. In the end, he falls in despair, and rejects all that religion stuff aside, becoming a bit bitter but lives goes on.

Much later, after living a life, probably having family, he finds himself thinking of the past, and finally after searching in his memories, he find some sort of peace and...


He commits suicide by jumping out of the tower. Peace at last.

[james.franklin1920]

The story is about the boy's initiation and mystical realization.

Not too sure where to begin from, but here goes.

It is a common belief among the traditions of the world that, as time passes, humans grow less spiritual and lose the understanding of old symbols and myths. At that point, they only keep those symbols as "cultural" stuff, like the Christmas tree for example, without any depth. Then, it is only a matter of time before the symbols themselves are entirely lost. However, the symbols were not man made to begin with, and their essence is indestructible and eternal. In this story, that essence is the Gorogoa.

Even when spiritual knowledge is largely gone, a number of people from all walks of life still keep parts of it preciously, passing them along so that someone may benefit from them down the line. Such people are the ones who built those normally unreachable twin houselets at the start of chapter 2, the gravity defying sculptures in chapter 4, the various painted or carved "fruit" signs, and so on. They were divinely guided in these works. Although these traditions are culturally dead, they are still spiritually active, meaning that although they cannot sustain anything collective anymore, they can still sustain an individual's path. Cultures are merely facilitators in the first place, they are not essential.

Among the kept symbols, the 5 "fruits" are the most important. The Gorogoa is beyond time and space, and the 5 fruits are 5 actions by which the Gorogoa manifests Itself in the world:

The red fruit is the act of setting apart certain beings for Itself.
The green fruit is the act of preserving the Memory of Itself throughout the world's fluctuations.
The yellow fruit is the act of taking a conceivable form that may attract beings and become their goal.
The blue fruit is the act of producing and sustaining the cycles of existence, like the center of the wheel sustains the rim.
The purple fruit is the act of uniting everything, including the previous actions.

The Gorogoa chose this boy. It was not the boy who caught a glimpse of It, it was It that appeared so as to entice the boy to seek It.

The miraculous journey of the boy was not a dream, it was all physically real. The Gorogoa chose this boy and set him apart for Itself. The Gorogoa is beyond time and space, thus it could guide the boy freely across time and space. It had him visit sacred places, and also his own future, though he did not realize it then (he did later). This was because each period of the boy's life was under the dominant influence of one of Gorogoa's actions. Thus, each fruit was a symbolic recursion of the period it appeared and was collected in, and each part of the boy's life was really a temple built across space and time.

Notice how odd it is that the blue fruit was just... there, in the middle of some ruins, yet not rotten? How the purple fruit was atop this tower in a pot? The presevers I mentioned earlier are the ones who did this. You can still see the purple paint bucket at the bottom of the tower. Someone had probably put that plant there recently. The Gorogoa basically told them to do this at that, and they did, perhaps without ever knowing exactly what purpose it would serve or when.

The boy's offering was not rejected, on the contrary. It was received in the appropriate fashion, as I'll explain below. The boy fell from 15+ meters right on his back, yet by the time he became adult he only had a limp. This is nothing short of a miracle. The truth is that this event was an effect of the Gorogoa's act of setting apart. In other words, this "failure" was the physical proof of his being chosen and accepted. However, since the Gorogoa is beyond time, Its will is distorted by appearance.

The final scene of the game is the one which ties everything together. In it, the now elderly boy contemplates the "rejected" offering. Upon focusing on one of the burnt fruit, the scene shifts to the corresponding age, with the boy apparently lost in dark thoughts. A detail sticks out: the thought squares are now circles. This is unique. Furthermore, the scenes that take place in these circles do not correspond to anything seen before, although they share some elements, in a shuffled way. These scenes are not memories: they occur in the boy's soul. Although these events influence the boy, he is not fully aware of them as they occur; to him, they are like sudden mood shifts.

The 5 fruits were not useless: could they have summoned the Gorogoa's appearance if they were? They each carried a blessing, a spiritual link to the Gorogoa. It was through these channels that the Gorogoa influenced the boy's psyche, using the impressions life left on the boy to form virtual fruits. For example, It used the impression that a certain book had left on the boy to form the virtual knowledge of just what the setting apart meant, implying that his "rejection" was part of the process. The boy did not understand it, but it gave him hope and strength to persevere. Just as the Gorogoa had guided the boy with Its grace to the symbolic fruits, so that the boy basically did no work, he also crafted the virtual fruits the elderly boy would later offer in the boy's very soul, so that, although the boy did work, it only produced fruit through the same grace. The Gorogoa provides Itself the offerings it asks.

Though the boy had received the fruits in his soul, he had not yet realized them. Only when he contemplated the burnt fruits did he realize the virtual fruits he'd been carrying all along. This is what Plato called anamnesis. This realization was beyond anything he could've imagined. At first, each fruit he realized made him know the Gorogoa's action beyond all words. These epiphanies were wonderful on their own, but when all fruit were realized something awesome happened.

The bowl was reconstructed. There was no memory or soul scenes associated with it, because the true bowl was the boy's own soul. Look at the way these "fruits" fuse with the "bowl": they expand into circles in such a way that the bowl fills exactly the lower half of these circles. The soul is nothing else than the synthesis of the Gorogoa's activities as they manifest, it is the single true fruit. The invisible upper half of the bowl is the formless essence of the Gorogoa. The one who has gathered the 5 true fruits has thereby gained true knowledge of himself: he knows that his self is the true offering, and that the Gorogoa is his true self. He can say like Al-Hallaj: "I am Truth". He knows that the Gorogoa provides Itself the offerings it asks.

The 5 symbolic fruits could open a path to the Gorogoa's activity, but that path was conditioned, as shown by the 5 gates surrounding the eye, and couldn't lead to the supreme goal. If they hadn't been destroyed, they would have been an obstacle. When the boy realized the Gorogoa, he reached beyond the five activities, into the mystery that links time and eternity. His person was absorbed into the absolute, through his own soul, which was the very essence of the Gorogoa's intent and choice for him. That's about as good an ending as it gets.

An interesting detail is how, in the 5th chapter, directions are given to the boy via his early childhood memories, but the final direction was given through a scene from his late future. This joining of of time was a prefiguration of the boy's reaching eternity. At the start of the game, the word GOROGOA is split in the middle, but in the end it is unified. The unified O is also the once-missing center of the pattern that was in the true green fruit scene. Also, the ending screen fills the whole monitor, rather than the squares only, and is reached by diving into the Gorogoa's eye.

[Jue.]

I think that it was a kind of meaning that the boy remind what he has done when yong and think absolutly different when he gets old。maybe It‘s a kind of reconciliation 。