Gnog distills the joy of fiddling with switches, dials, and knobs into a potent liquid and then uses that fluorescent elixir to invigorate a monster's brain. The result is a collection of orderly puzzles eager to illustrate logic while soaked in giddying medley of spaceships, electricity, and mother birds. If you were ever allowed to peer inside of a candy monster's skull, Gnog is precisely what you would find.
Imagine a monster made of bright colors and sour candy. Now picture the inside of its head; there’s no brain meat here, just a bunch of propellers, deep sea diving equipment, and dangerous amounts of electricity. For some reason it’s all slathered in brightly colored goop, and yet every piece is neatly arranged and separated. You’re driven to make sense of this. Welcome to Gnog.
Gnog is a collection of ten diverse puzzles that take place inside of different monster heads. Each one is full of dials to turn, switches to flip, and pinwheels to spin. Performing these actions draws different pieces of the setting into action, calling upon the player to determine the logic of the scene and process it accordingly. Gnog is ticklish mixture between a diorama and a Mighty Max (or Polly Pocket) toy, only with a slightly obscured start and end point.
There’s a certain tactile and audible pleasure to the crisp snap of flipping a switch. It’s why everything in Japan has a sound effect, why Apple’s default messaging tones are focus tested to hell and back, and why fidget cubes exist. Ordinary actions are more satisfying when they’re highlighted with a microscopic amount of positive feedback, and Gnog is profoundly aware of this. Every switch does something and usually has a cool noise, and in a raw level it’s like an adult version of an excersaucer. It’s full of stuff to play with even if you don’t immediately want (or know how) to do it in the right order.
Your only means of interaction is a swirling cursor and the ability to rotate the monster’s head 180 degrees. Gnog might feel more at home with a mouse, sometimes the DualShock 4’s analog stick is ill-equipped to turn a dial, but it’s mostly fine. In any case, pulling out plugs, tweaking levers, and pushing potent buttons is the extent of your interaction.
While each puzzle is different, all share the same basic pattern. The front portion is a sleeping monster’s face. The back of the head can be flipped open after solving a brief preamble, revealing the core of the challenge. There are exceptions to this process, some puzzles have multiple scenes inside of a monster’s head, but all generally follow a regulated pattern. There are no explicit red herrings, and I was only stuck when I wasn’t paying attention to the environment.
In some way, the writing’s always (sometimes literally) on the wall. Different dots by familiar pictures may indicate the proper order of operations to fire up a teleporter. Spinning a tiny humanoid inside of a gyroscopic cell may correspond to the particular arrangement of ice cream necessary to open a candy stand. It’s possible to barf in the mouth of every baby bird, as long as you aim the mother’s head properly. Gnog is weird, but it’s not chaos.
Gnog also embraces the same freedom of play that helped define games like Hohokum. A built-in level of abstraction conceals the natural goal, but generally you’ll find your course just by goofing around with every available option. There’s a natural flow to the game, undoubtedly aided by Marskye’s kaleidoscopic electronic music. Each track builds with the level and reaches a crescendo by its completion. The nature of puzzles games ensures your time is expertly authored, which minimizes the chance for individual variation but guarantees a handmade experience. This is a tradeoff that Gnog embraces warmly.
With that in mind, there are few out-side-the-box variances inside each puzzle. I only know (well, assume) this because there is a set of hidden trophies, and all that I unlocked corresponded to something extra weird I did inside of a particular puzzle. Truthfully, playing around with stuff and figuring these out would be the only reason to revisit Gnog once you’ve finished all ten levels, provided you don’t want to just sit back and absorb the show. Otherwise, it’s a fine way to spend three hours.
Gnog is also equipped to operate inside of PlayStation VR. I briefly suspected this would only be advantageous if you were in possession of your preferred mind-altering supplement—the visual assault of surrounding lights and colors, the three-dimensional rapture of ludicrous monster pieces, and Marskeye’s audio invasion are intense, man—but it quickly settled into a more serene experience. Virtual reality only improves the core, if for no other reason than to further engulf the player in brightly-lit silliness.
Gnog’s strength is also its leash. It’s not especially easy, but the compact nature of its levels (other than HOM-3) impose severe limitations to its capability. EATER could have gone further with its cooking lessons. LOG may have benefited from squawking its tones in different patterns. Gnog justifies its $15 price on concept and novelty alone—and I understand that making intuitive puzzles is harder than anything I do in my day-to-day—but part of me wished the madcap geniuses at Ko-op would have pushed Gnog a little harder.
In the end, Gnog distills the joy of fiddling with switches, dials, and knobs into a potent liquid and then uses that fluorescent elixir to invigorate a monster’s brain. The result is a collection of orderly puzzles eager to illustrate logic while soaked in giddying medley of spaceships, electricity, and mother birds. If you were ever allowed to peer inside of a candy monster’s skull, Gnog is precisely what you would find.
