Such actions resonate with the game’s larger themes of discovering, through study and spiritual practice, hidden correspondence in things that otherwise seem isolated and distinct. A simple puzzle may require one to zoom in on one panel’s detail, like a bird resting on a tree, and in another panel, a painting that depicts an apple on a branch. Aligning the panels fuses the scene together so that the apple is on the branch of the outdoor tree.

At the start of the game a magical-looking creature passes low over a city skyline. From a window, a boy clutching a book follows the creature with his eyes. Opening the volume in his hands he finds a picture of the creature and, below that, a picture of two men – one young, the other elderly – kneeling together and holding up a large blue bowl.

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Suspended in the air above them are five different coloured symbols. The boy fetches a blue bowl from a closet shelf and stands in the doorway. In an adjacent panel, one sees a door facing out on a street. Dragging that panel over the one of the boy standing in the closet doorway creates a new scene: the boy steps out onto the street where, eventually, an apple falls into his bowl. Via a thought bubble, we see that he associates the apple with one of the signs that appeared above the bowl in the book.

As the boy undertakes a quest to find four other pieces of magical fruit, the game introduces other characters who may share similar identities. Among them are a scholarly-looking man who, from the comfort of his home, pours over texts pertaining to the same apparition that transfixed the boy, and another young man engaging in similar study as a war rages around him. Themes of pilgrimage, ritual, and an openness to metaphysical discovery unite the strands of their stories.

The joys of the game are rooted in its structure: seeing how one seemingly disparate scene links up with others and dissolves into the next is like witnessing a masterful display of trickery. Roberts says one of the people who inspired the direction of the game is the renowned comic book artist Chris Ware.

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Gorogoa’s creator Jason Roberts says: “The layouts on the page are so huge and elaborate that it becomes sort of the work in itself (which) transcends the sequential and chronological structure of traditional comic book panels and becomes a broader, multidimensional collage. I wanted that but with moving parts.”

If I were curating a show about video games as art I would include Gorogoa. It sinks or swims depending on one’s appreciation of its aesthetic values, and in all likelihood one’s feelings for the game will hinge on whether one finds it beautiful rather than fun.