Horizon of Expectations in Inside and Gorogoa (Spoiler Alert)
The horizon is the line that defines how far we can see. Every video game features a type of horizon called the horizon of expectations. What this means is that there are things in video games that we expect when we play them. This horizon is subject to change as we make progress through games. This can be simply called, a change in a player’s horizon of expectations. Two games that do this exceptionally well, especially in their end sequences, are Playdead’s Inside (2016) and Buried Signal’s Gorogoa (2017).
Despite both games being puzzle games at their core, it feels like they couldn’t be more different in their moment to moment gameplay. Inside adopts 2D platformer gameplay while maintaining a dark and creepy tone. All I really expected when I first got into Inside was clever puzzles and an interesting art style. For the most part, that remained true. In fact, I found myself pretty much awestruck throughout my playthrough of Inside. I would say the game is technically and artistically perfect. I never ran into any glitches and the game was beautiful and consistent all throughout. Despite the darker tones in the art and puzzles, I found myself pretty comfortable with the game and expected to be for all of my playthrough. Then my horizon of expectations shifted.
Upon entering the mysterious facility near the end of the game I found myself quite curious. It wasn’t an accident why the boy ended up here. I thought maybe he was trying to steal something in an effort to undo all the horrible things that seemed to be done there. Then came the Huddle sequence. When I was first introduced to the Huddle my mouth opened in shock and fascination. When the boy got sucked into the Huddle and then I gained control of it, my mouth remained in the same position. I was dumbfounded for the rest of the game. A minor shift in my horizon of expectations came when the Huddle came to what seems to be the CEO of sorts. With no regard for human life, the Huddle allowed me to plow through the CEO crushing and killing him. At this point it became clear: the Huddle cares for nothing other than itself. Finally when the Huddle breaks out of the facility and rests in the sunlight it appears it has finally completed its escape. Yet, it still feels like there’s more to the story. Though through it all, I was still flabbergasted as for what had just happened.
Gorogoa on the other hand starts out bright and colorful. The game is played through manipulating four panels which contain art pieces that players can zoom in and out of. There is a lot more to Gorogoa and one definitely has to play it to really understand how it works. Because of how unique it is, all I really focused on while I was playing was seeing how cool it was to interact with and solve all the puzzles. Through the first part of the game it was a breeze. All I had to do was keep clicking and dragging to see where things fit. The puzzle with the green apple and the tree branches did a great job of introducing how all the puzzles in the game would function. As the story goes it seems to begin more colorful and cheerful with a decent amount of wonder. I definitely felt curious about the colorful dragon that the boy was collecting all the fruit for.
My horizon of expectations with the boy and his story shifted as the game progressed. Seeing how much struggle he went through including war, injury and age made it clear that either the boy didn;t collect all the fruit or that collecting all of it proved fruitless (no pun intended). In terms of the puzzles, my horizon of expectations definitely shifted once the falling rock puzzle began. The puzzles began to require consideration of timing on top of the normal puzzle solving. It was interesting to see how many people found this puzzle frustrating in class. I actually quite enjoyed it, so I was looking forward to more puzzles that required me to think differently in order to solve them. Unfortunately, the next puzzle that required more thinking was more frustrating. The puzzle in which the player engages in moving the boy through pictures of what seemed to be his life seemed cool enough, but it also includes matching certain scenes with other scenes in the boy’s life. I found this sequence to be quite thwarting. So much so that I had to use the internet in order to figure out how to continue. I was grateful that none of the puzzles after this point in the game required me to reference a guide again.
At the end of the game, when we see that Gorogoa rejected the boy's offering, it becomes a bit more clear as to why his life was a struggle. My horizon of expectations jumped into one of much more blurriness at this point though. I began asking myself questions about whether or not Gorogoa made the boy’s life so difficult as a kind of punishment, or if the war that the boy lived through was somehow caused by Gorogoa’s rejection of the offering. My horizon got even more obscured upon seeing Gorogoa accept the same offering from the boy when he is elderly. I’m still wondering what made the difference, and I don’t think there is an answer. In the end, my horizon of expectations for Gorogoa rests on unanswered questions.
Both Gorogoa and Inside did a great job of shifting and changing my horizon of expectations as I played through them. Perhaps that is why I enjoy both of them so much. Both games also do an excellent job of keeping their endings very ambiguous. This allows me and others to continuously wonder about what the conclusions really mean. They are definitely games that I will be constantly returning to throughout my career as a video game player.
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