In this lushly illustrated puzzle game, doorframes and windows become portals to distant worlds. As you rearrange Gorogoa’s hand-drawn, comic book-style frames, you delve ever deeper into a confoundingly fragmented space-time. Yet these impossible connections have a rigorous, beautiful logic.

The story opens with a boy who experiences a strange vision and feels compelled to seek its meaning. That, in fact, is the crux of the game: the search for meaning, whether in the nooks and crannies of his world, in the way everything fits together, or in how our relationship to the magical and spiritual evolves as we mature.

Oh, there’s a giant monster lurking somewhere around here too.

To progress, rearrange and manipulate hand-drawn panels to uncover hidden objects and settings. You might click to zoom into a scene, then pan across it seeking clues. In some puzzles, the solution lies in aligning multiple panels to create a larger expanse; in others, placing one panel atop another makes an element from one tile—like a teetering ball—roll down to the next.

Fitting panels into place is just the start. You may discover that a peculiar design in one panel fits perfectly into an empty frame elsewhere. Drag one over the other and—eureka!—complete an entirely new picture, which, when you zoom out, transports you spatially and temporally.

First-time developer Jake Roberts created Gorogoa (named after a monster from his childhood) over the course of five years, handling all of the programming, artwork, and design himself. Like the game’s story, the puzzles are unapologetically enigmatic. There are riddles within riddles, scenes within scenes. Roberts named his company Buried Signal for good reason.

But when you finally stumble upon a solution and see how the panels click—well, that feels like nothing less than a revelation.