GNOG (PC) Review

GNOG provides a handful of environments and objects that act as puzzle boxes of sorts, and challenges you to solve them. These boxes look like children's toys, with enticing colours and intriguing appendages beckoning people to interact with them and see what happens when doing so. Indeed, that's the order of the day; playing with these boxes to solve their simple puzzles and unlock them, seeing them change as progress through the puzzles is made, and being rewarded with the humour sounds and visuals of the whole transformation.

It's an experience that would work fine with traditional 2D screens, but VR does a tremendous job of making this experience more engaging and novel. For such simple shape and colours, GNOG is hugely immersive, its puzzle boxes floating in a void and allowing you to freely venture around them and play with them. It's terrifically enjoyable and nostalgic, tapping into childhood memories of wonder and discovery.

This engagement is further achieved through excellent music that blends expertly with the noises of the puzzle boxes. It's all a bit trippy. This is especially so as the puzzle boxes reveal themselves to be almost living beings, with clear faces and even personalities forming when interacting with them. Look more deeply into this and GNOG suddenly turns rather dark, as you pull out teeth and eyes from these floating toy boxes in a quest to wake them. The blocky toy aesthetic, though, brings it back to robotic forms or even simply imaginary creatures you perceive as alive through the power of imagination, and some strong visual cues.

It's all very easy, however. Each level, although brilliantly diverse from one another visually, follows similar logical steps to complete them, and even at its most complex these puzzles do not pose a challenge in the slightest. However, that appears to be the point; GNOG wants you to enjoy the interaction and flow of the experience rather than stall on any particular part, and it makes the experience feel all the more pleasant for this.