Monument Valley is a puzzle game developed using the Unity Engine and published by Ustwo games and released in 2014. The core of the game is to help navigate Princess Ida through a series of mazes presented in an isometric view, where you must identify and locate hidden passageways that allow you to traverse the maze. Ultimately, the isometric aesthetic of the game’s levels, along with the hidden passageways and moveable segments of the levels, elicits a mystical and curiosity-filled experience that forces users to explore and experiment with the world and its various features in order to “conquer” the challenges the world presents.
What makes the gameplay challenging is the series of optical illusions that are presented, making it more and more difficult to find a path as the levels progress. There are a variety of mechanics within each of the levels in Monument Valley, including moving platforms, series of levers, and pillars that you can interact with and change the architecture of the current level to allow yourself to find a way out. This type of design allows the user to use logic and creativity to transform a seemingly inescapable path into one that has a route to escape, and the “fun” lies in this challenge to make the seemingly impossible possible. I also found that the inclusion of all of these experimental elements elicits a sense of mystery in the world, and this enhances the intrigue the players have in each of the levels, and in investigating them to explore the different ways they can be manipulated. Furthermore, each level has one path to escape, which lends the internal gameplay to be more structurally directed, but allows for the external structure to still give off a sense of exploration (i.e., you’re exploring to find a singular path of escape). Overall, Monument Valley is an aesthetically pleasing, geometrically simplistic yet illusion-filled game that elicits a sense of mystique and challenge through user exploration and experimentation. When playing Monument Valley, it reminded me a lot of an iOS game called Where’s my Water, which also had various levels where the user would have to carve out a path for water to travel with key restrictions such as obstacles or gravity that force the player to brainstorm, explore, and find a path through creative means.
