Monument Valley is an indie puzzle game developed by usTwo games, accessible to players of all ages and backgrounds. I played it on iOS with an iPhone over the course of two days. The mechanics of Monument Valley create optical illusions and fascinating, novel uses of space, dimensions, and physics to tell an ephemeral story of forgiveness and repentance.
The player plays as Princess Ida, a simple being with a white hat. The player is told that Ida is seeking forgiveness – for what, it is unclear. The player progresses from level to level by entering through doorways, each introducing a new spatial puzzle. At one level, the player is able to rotate the entire puzzle; at another, the crow people can press buttons that open up hidden doors or passageways. At the end of each level, Ida is able to speak with a priestly figure, who reveals information about the story, Ida’s past, and her reasons for returning to the “sacred geometry” of Monument Valley.
The puzzles all revolve around novel uses of space and environment. One involved rotating the entire puzzle to connect two unconnected paths. Another featured a descension into the water, with a structure that rose higher and higher each time Ida reached the surface. One of my favorites featured a box that opened up into several different puzzles, with each dependent on another. Ida wandered through doorways that connected to other parts of the box. Eventually, the entire box opened up, and all four parts were connected. Playing Monument Valley allowed me to enter a world where physics and dimensions were wholly different, and the simplicity of the art and beautiful colors added to the beauty and wonder of the world.
As a game designer, I was paying close attention to how the game lulled the player into understanding the rules of the world. It closely follows the golden rule (unless specified otherwise, everything inside your world is assumed to behave exactly as it would in the real world) very well, since each puzzle was very intentional about introducing new mechanics and uses of space slowly. In this way, the game also utilized arcs and loops. Each level featured a new loop – getting introduced to a mechanic and understanding how to use it to progress through the level. The overarching loop of the game involves the narrative and the combination of the interactions of level mechanics in the final level, where learned features and tricks from previous levels are all utilized.
Through ephemeral conversations with the priestly figure and visual storytelling, the narrative of the story is revealed only to attentive and detail-oriented players. There are only a few lines of dialogue and the end of each level, revealing, piece-by-piece, that Princess Ida has returned to the land of the Valley, created by humans and now dominated by crows. The crows are hostile towards Ida, blocking the way and squawking at her when she gets close. However, at the end of the game, the full story is revealed. Ida brings a red flower to a human’s tomb and turns into a crow, symbolizing that she was seeking forgiveness from the humans for taking over their geometry and that she was once the crow Princess. By not revealing the full narrative until the end, Monument Valley rewards the slowness of play, the experience of enjoying and revering the beauty of the puzzles and the world.
Monument Valley is a beautiful game, with an immersive soundtrack and stunning puzzles. My experience playing the game was exquisite and wonderful. The mechanics of the game were able to create an immersive, physics-defying world, whose rules were slowly and intentionally revealed to the player in order to tell a narrative of loss and forgiveness.
