GNOG is an explosively happy and positive experience

1.2.2024

By John Walker, ContributorThe debate about “what is a game?” can be usefully solved with one simple phrase: “Shut up.” That dealt with, we can all sit down to enjoy the splendid game GNOG. You can think of this extraordinary creation as a sort of fidget toy: a series of magically animated boxes that burst with color and sound as you experiment with buttons and switches. It’s explosively happy—it’s explosive happiness, in video game form.

What’s really striking about GNOG is its absolute confidence. There’s none of the timidity you might expect from a first-time project from an indie team, which might gently introduce its concepts before ramping up to something more in-your-face. Instead, GNOG begins at a 10, roaring and bouncing and erupting with its bold designs and color schemes. Its assuredness encourages you to start poking at it. There are no instructions because prodding and experimenting is the game, and its conviction in its own delivery leaves you in no doubt that this is what you ought to be doing.

Each level begins in a parcel that, when opened, reveals something like a lunch pail. When you open this box, the level emerges; it’s essentially a puzzle box that’s covered in levers, buttons, wheels and switches, all there for you to just muck about with. It’s pretty much impossible to know what anything does before you do it. A lever might trigger gorgeous, soundtracked animations to play out; highlighting a row of fish-shaped lights might remove a panel that reveals more interactive items for you to mess with.

In the end, what you have is a series of puzzle boxes that frequently defy the notion of puzzles. You can’t really know what you’re aiming to achieve, nor what action will achieve it. This rewrites your purposeful interaction with the game—at its best moments, this removes the desire to “solve” and replaces it with the far more pure desire to play. There are more familiar puzzly elements—occasionally, you’ll see what you can recognize as instructions and realize that it’s encouraging you to put this dial in this position—but these are GNOG’s least interesting moments.

Each level is marked as completed (because there’s no real coherent notion of completeness) when the box itself starts to sing. When this happens, kaleidoscopic background animations dance around, and everything is just joyful and exciting and positive. Every interaction is so sonically and visually interesting that you feel like you’re playing the adult equivalent of a baby’s interactive playmat. In these level-completing moments of singing and dancing joy, I found the grown person’s version of a baby’s pure delight.

It’s wonderful that GNOG has no greater purpose—no deeper message—because encouraging aimless play is already great and deep enough. It’s so completely beautiful, and sounds so superb, that just fiddling and tweaking is all the reward it needs to offer.

You can check out GNOG on the Epic Games Store.