Jason Roberts has announced that his visual puzzler, Gorogoa, will “soon” be available to download for the PS4. The developer marked the occasion with an extended essay on “The Power of The Frame” at the PlayStation Blog:
With the notable exception of VR, almost everything we consume is inside a frame, whether that frame is the edge of the TV screen, or the monitor, or the phone, or the movie screen. And we’re generally trained to forget about the frame and what’s outside of it. We want to forget ourselves, the room we’re in, the sorry old world we’re in. The disappearance of the frame is a big part of what we mean by “immersion.” We aim for total suspension of disbelief. Total projection of the mind through the frame.
And if you’re waiting for me to denounce this way of relating to media, I’m not going to! Why would I? It works just fine. But I also think that creatively, the space outside that frame is a huge unexplored frontier–as strange as that might sound at first.
Gorogoa opens with a small framed image of a cityscape, in the middle of an otherwise empty screen. The obvious decision to leave empty space makes the frame visible, and that was done for a reason. The frame itself is part of the message. I find this mysteriously compelling. And I want to poke into that mystery a little.
We don’t have an exact release date for Gorogoa’s PS4 debut other than “soon,” but the developer’s essay is certainly interesting, and I’m sure it’ll keep a lot of people occupied until the game is ready.
UPDATE: Publisher Annapurna Interactive has confirmed that Gorogoa will also “soon” be available to download for the Xbox One as well.
