Game: Monument Valley, UsTwo games.
Target Audience: Players who appreciate the sharp, novel, visual aesthetic, and vague narrative driven by puzzles, not hardcore puzzle game players.
Platform: Switch, which was a huge mistake.
Monument Valley focuses attention directly on its puzzle mechanics through its minimal aesthetic, point-and-click interface, and Escher-style 3D space manipulation. These puzzle mechanics then shape the experience of gameplay through their sound design and difficulty curve.
The top-down view and clean, minimalist visuals highlight the puzzle directly—there’s no question of where the interaction points are, as is the case in the puzzles of the Uncharted series. The puzzles themselves are 3D spatial navigation puzzles, but whereas the minimalist aesthetic might suggest a focus on character movement (as in the digital domain levels of Ghostrunner), the designers explicitly head this off with a point-and-click interface. This interface induces the player to slow down by making it clear that movement will not be part of the challenge. This is further reinforced by the first puzzle, which introduces the Escher-style dynamics and sets the expectation for the puzzles to come.
The design of the puzzles themselves serves many auxiliary gameplay features. The sliding-rock sounds of the pieces falling into place are both satisfying (the sound of stepping on the goal block) and create tension (the stair sections slowly dropping at the end of the black descent). From a player interaction perspective, the sounds that play when manipulating pieces are both a sonic language for how pieces move (e.g. ascending/descending scale for a piece that moves vertically in discrete increments) and an assistance/tutorial feature, playing different sounds when the player snaps a piece into the right configuration. This subtle assistance is good design because it fits well with the minimalist aesthetic—the only onscreen tutorial text is in the first level. Such assistance also helps modulate difficulty, which the designers take advantage of to provide a non-standard (to me) difficulty curve.
My expectation from other puzzles games (like Portal) would be that the difficulty curve is roughly monotonically increasing—each new area usually has one part that is harder than previous parts. I found that the beginning puzzles were more challenging than the middle puzzles, with difficulty not increasing until the very end of the game. The decision to start with the Escher-style mechanics set up an expectation of an increasing difficulty dynamic culminating in intensely satisfying challenge fun. But the fact that many of the middle puzzles consisted of turning a single lever belied that expectation.
The mismatch in expectation suggests that the target audience is not hardcore puzzle game solvers. Rather, the game is a puzzle that wants to be accessible to players who value the minimalist aesthetic, environmental storytelling, or overall mood. The design choices discussed to this point make it seem that Monument Valley is more interested in the beauty of its puzzles rather than their difficulty.
If this is the case, however, the lack of explicit tutorial features and immediate introduction of Escher-style 3D space manipulation assumes a certain sort of player. That sort of puzzle/art style is something I’ve seen before, so as soon as it was introduced I immediately knew what to look for going forward. Someone who hasn’t seen that puzzle/art style before might have found the game to be less accessible. This comfort with a certain puzzle style is a specific example of a phenomenon that is pronounced in games among other visual media: accessibility of games varies wildly based on player experience. For example, assuming no physical limitations, I can watch any movie having never seen a movie before within its runtime, but there are some games where if I try to play them having never played a game before it will take me ten times as long as another player with more experience (my parents, who I’ve forced to play video games in retirement, confirm this).
As a final note on accessibility, I played Monument Valley on Switch, which was a mistake because the point-and-click interface does not transfer well. I would instead have used left stick for character movement, A button for select nearest puzzle pieces, and LR buttons to tab between puzzle pieces. This slightly reduces the puzzle-focus that the pure point-and-click interface provided, but I think the quality of life improvement for a joystick controller is worth it.
