Gorogoa

Gorogoa

119 ratings
What is the story of Gorogoa?
By XanthumChum
Gorogoa is clearly a beautiful game visually, but I certainly didn't understand the story on my first play-through. It's non-linear, and it's not even clear that there is a story at all, but as I played through it a few more times hunting achievements, I started to notice some things...

I'm going to try to unpack what I've found.
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Summary
The story follows a boy in a red shirt on his quest to please Gorogoa, the massive, colorful dragon. We help him on his journey to collect the five fruits to present to Gorogoa, and see some other male characters at various life stages and in different contexts throughout the story, weaving in and out of view.

After collecting the five fruits, the boy presents them to Gorogoa, who rejects his offering and casts him out of the tower, leaving him crushed physically and spiritually.

It's revealed that the characters along the way were all the same character.

After his fall, he is wheelchair-bound for some time (hospital gown).

He is then able to move to crutches, but finds himself in the midst of a war (ripped, gray clothes).

He studies mythology about a creature who is half horse, half three-tailed fish in hopes of finding a connection to Gorogoa, which is ultimately fruitless. The war ends and rebuilding begins.

The boy, now a teen (white, collared shirt) goes on a pilgrimage, seeking penance for his misdeed.

As an adult (green shirt), he stares out the window on the anniversary that he first saw Gorogoa, the memory of his fall haunting him, and concludes that his pilgrimage was also fruitless.

As an old man (white shirt, brown vest), still with a bad leg, he reviews his journey and his findings. He dons a brown coat and a red scarf and he again takes the train to the tower, climbs it, and prepares his offering. He reviews his life and how he sought the goal of reconciliation at every point.

This time, Gorogoa is satisfied, and the man ascends.
To come...
I hope to share more of what I found. There is so much attention detail in this game. Depths that can only be discovered by many playthroughs. I hope you are able to discover some of it for yourself!
11 Comments
Kane 5 Jul @ 6:19am 
Thank you for bringing some consistency. To me I cant shake off the Buddhism like influences... And it looks like the story goes back to the start, like the circle of life...
aidennqueen 15 Jun @ 4:43am 
Right off the bat I felt like the dragon was a representation of the man's PTSD he retained from the war he experienced as a boy, and his journey was about learning to cope and come to terms with it to find some peace.
SF 6 May @ 9:29pm 
only with the benefit of long hindsight can he see the lessons he's learned along the way. only now can he look back upon his life and see how all the pieces fit together. He didn't have them all until just now. But now he has attained wisdom (purple fruit). True comprehension with all the texture required for the offering to be accepted.

What is the Gorogoa? That's up to you. Perhaps it's God. Perhaps it's transcendence. Maybe it's simply Meaning. Perhaps it's devotion to an ideal. Perhaps its simply the wish the child asked for so long ago, and they didn't realize what they'd have to endure to get it.
SF 6 May @ 9:29pm 
You can also look at the story as a search for meaning or understand in life when bad things happen.

The boy reads about this mythology of the dragon monster/gorogoa(?).
He thinks he understands, but its the understanding of a child. lacking in genuine comprehension.

Then a terrible thing happens to the boy. He suffers (red fruit).
He has to find the will to keep going. To grow and overcome. To perservere and survive. He chooses life. (green fruit.)
Then he goes on a very, very long journey of seeking enlightenment through knowledge. ever chasing the elusive moth (yellow fruit.)
But ultimately he's left unfulfilled. So he tries another long journey of spirituality and pilgrimages (blue fruit.)
into his old age, he looks back on his life and asks "What was this all for? Why did I fail? Why was I punished? Why did this happen to me?"
Photiel 27 Feb @ 8:12am 
Wow that's so insightful! Thank you.
Popcorn 2 Aug, 2024 @ 7:25pm 
If you haven't. Watch Jacob Gellers video. I think he's pretty spot on.
randolf 25 Feb, 2024 @ 4:34pm 
Good piece, and the comments below augment it. GG. Amazing "game" that took many years of Devotion ;)
Burning Phoenix 3 Aug, 2023 @ 7:29pm 
It seems Gorogoa wanted this to begin with. The drawing from the book shows both a young boy AND an old man presenting the offering to Gorogoa. The offering is not the man's fruit, but his whole life in devotion to Gorogoa. After all, the achievement for completing the game is called: "Devotion."
ikabubu 10 Dec, 2022 @ 11:28am 
My interpretation is a bit more allegorical: this is the story about a story. More specifically, the journey of a writer's lifetime. Struck by inspiration to create his story, his mythical creature and "white whale", when he was a young boy. Each "fruit" being a core tenet of an idea that creates the whole. But his inexperience leads to despair, possibly a failure to create a story of truly expressing himself. He mistook each "fruit" to mean an actual fruit, instead of the fruit of experience. Possibly an allusion to naiveté, or attempting to create something of weight without the context of life experience. This is why we revisit each fruit again, this time at different stages of his life, now ripened with the context of hindsight. It took an entire lifetime's worth of experiences to truly assemble the final components of his masterwork. Only then was he successful in creating his Gorogoa, a masterwork truly expressing himself. That's my take.
A Simple Pigeon 23 Nov, 2022 @ 8:35am 
Oh wow, I was interpreting each chapter as a long extended period of time searching for the fruit, often to his old age, and then his younger self using the expended effort of his potential future to find the fruit. This makes much more sense and is way less abstract lol.