Shifting Worlds, Shifting Paths, Shifting Minds: How Monument Valley Uses Puzzle Mechanics to Shape Player Experience
Monument Valley, developed by Ustwo games, is a mobile puzzle game available on iOS and Android that invites players into a serene, Escher-inspired dreamscape. Its target audience ranges from casual mobile gamers to fans of artful, meditative games, including teenagers and adults seeking a soothing yet intellectually stimulating experience. The protagonist, Princess Ida, traverses impossible architecture in search of redemption, and though the story is sparse, revealing only bits and pieces at each level, the emotional and narrative weight of the journey emerges powerfully through the mechanics themselves. From this, I believe that Monument Valley turns the act of puzzle-solving into an embodied metaphor for discovery, using mechanic-driven shifts in perspective to reframe how players experience agency, space, and meaning. In doing so, it offers an elegant counterexample to what Bob Bates in Designing the Puzzle calls “designer puzzles”, obstacles that serve themselves rather than the story.
The brilliance of Monument Valley lies in how it makes perspective itself the mechanic. Each puzzle asks the player to rotate parts of the level, slide architecture into new configurations, or step onto new paths formed by optical illusions that would not exist in the physical world. These impossible spaces aren’t just visually novel, they directly shape how players understand movement and consequence. For instance, one early level asks players to rotate a tower so that two separate platforms line up visually. Only then can Princess Ida walk across what, in a true three-dimensional space, should be a chasm. This kind of puzzle illustrates what Scott Kim describes as a perceptual shift, requiring the player to abandon literal logic and instead “play” with the rules of visual space.
Turning the paths in the middle connects them to the top right path in an optical illusion – this would not happen in real life.
These mechanic-induced shifts evoke what MDA theory calls “aesthetic responses”, or in this case, a combination of surprise, serenity, and satisfaction. There’s no time limit, no death, no text-based tutorial. Instead, the world communicates through sound, movement, and visual rhythm. Every level is its own toy, a space for the player to experiment before deducing the “right” answer. This playful quality, which Kim and Bates both assert as crucial for good puzzle design, ensures that players are drawn into an intuitive, non-verbal dialogue with the game. Unlike games that rely on traditional logic puzzles or arbitrary “key-door” mechanics, Monument Valley asks players to change their thinking and the way they would normally perceive things, not just find the correct object.
In terms of genre comparison, Monument Valley differs drastically from other puzzle games, like The Room. Where those games rely on literal logic chains or textual rules, Monument Valley is conceptual and spatial. It doesn’t ask “What do you know?” but rather “Can you see this differently?” This fosters what game designer Ernest Adams calls narrative architecture: the story emerges not through exposition, but through spatial exploration and subtle environmental cues. For instance, the levels slowly introduce new characters such as the totem (a friendly companion block), whose interactions with Ida deepen the emotional stakes without a single line of dialogue. Furthermore, compared to the Edith Finch walking simulator game, that narrates the story through text that appears on-screen, the dialogue that exists in Monument Valley is only through brief pieces of text which reveal very little, when Ida comes across an ethereal figure every two or three levels or so. This adds an element of mystery to the game’s tone, and further emphasizes the idea that the story is not told through dialogue, but through the discovery and perspective shift that it urges its players to do.
The chapter intros and the short interactions with the ethereal being add some information into the narrative through text, but remains mysterious and ambiguous.
Yet, for all its elegance, Monument Valley raises ethical questions about accessibility and inclusivity. The game assumes a specific kind of visual-spatial literacy. It expects that players can perceive and manipulate 3D illusions, which may exclude those with visual impairments, depth-perception issues, or neurodiverse cognitive styles. The reliance on perspective trickery may be inaccessible to players who process spatial relationships differently. There are no built-in accessibility features such as audio cues, contrast settings, or alternative puzzle-solving methods, an oversight that subtly limits who gets to participate in the “aha!” moments the game so artfully creates.
Moreover, the game’s design presumes certain cultural knowledge: the aesthetic is inspired by sacred geometry, Islamic architecture, and Japanese minimalism. While the references are respectful and abstracted, there’s a subtle assumption that players will find these styles beautiful or calming. This raises a key issue from Bates’ discussion of puzzle design: designers must avoid “designer puzzles” that only make sense from a narrow cultural or cognitive perspective. Monument Valley avoids many of those traps by being intuitive and exploratory, but greater accessibility options would make it a more inclusive example of fair puzzle design.
To improve inclusivity, Ustwo games could implement optional verbal guidance for spatial reasoning, haptic feedback for successful alignments, or alternative paths for players who struggle with perception-based puzzles. These additions would align with the reading’s emphasis on “player empathy”, a puzzle designer’s ability to inhabit the player’s perspective and anticipate what might exclude or frustrate them.
Ultimately, Monument Valley is not just a puzzle game: it’s a meditation on perspective. It teaches players to look differently, to find paths where none appear to exist, and to experience the joy of reorientation. Its mechanics are its message: transformation happens not through force, but through subtle shifts in how we see the world. And while its elegant minimalism makes it a genre-defining experience, broader accessibility would allow more players to step into its quietly profound world.
