Yesterday, when speaking about Death Stranding no longer being a Sony exclusive, I also spoke about the title. A title I find as memorable as an Alan Wake/Stephen King book, though the pronunciation of it doesn’t get the question: So how does one pronounce GNOG? No matter how hard I try, I keep saying, “G-NOG.” I don’t know how to pronounce it any other way, including how the Saturday morning cartoon monster does at the game’s beginning.

So what is GNOG? Well, it is hard to define as it is a puzzle game; but it is a puzzle game in the sense of asking “What do I do now?” This weird little psychedelic burst of color is strange and wonderful, however, I’d have to break out a dictionary and ask, what is a game? While GNOG is a game, it doesn’t fit in the prototypical game with objectives to fail, or raccoon mafias to break your kneecaps. The only challenge is your own inability to think: “If I knock over this bin, I could find a lightbulb to attract a butterfly, then the troll on the bed can eat it.” Yes, out of the box thinking isn’t the half of it.

For every little puzzle I’ve touched in my short amount of time with GNOG, it was a variant of, twist this knob, press this button and watch a thing happen; try to find the puzzle somewhere else on the screen. None of which is to say, GNOG is bad, it is just lacking direction. I won’t apologize for becoming accustomed to a somewhat designed experience over the years. Especially when it comes to a game such as this with no direction what-so-ever. Honestly, I found it easier to understand with a controller, as I could use the analog sticks to precisely twiddle a thing or turn the box the puzzles are based in.

GNOG is available for free until August the 15th on the Epic Games store. From there on we will be back to the two games being given away, I assume to make my life miserable next week. The games in question are Heart Machine’s Hyper Light Drifter, and a gritty reboot of DuckTales, X-com, and Beyond Good and Evil in Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden.