2 a.m., red eyes, and a very long day behind me. I remembered a pending Critical Play on puzzles – probably the last thing I wanted to do at that hour, but duty was calling. I usually end my day with a 15-minute meditation using Sam Harris’ Waking Up app to decompress and transition into a more tranquil perceptual space, but last night it was Monument Valley instead.
As the app was downloading to my Mac, I warmed the kettle and grabbed a bag of jasmine tea, set the eucalyptus essential oil in the diffuser, and dimmed the lights to their lowest glow.
Monument Valley 2
Creator: ustwo games
Target Audience: Casual gamers, puzzle lovers, and players interested in artistic and emotionally resonant experiences (typically ages 12 and up)
Platform: iOS, Android, Windows, Mac
I was greeted with beautiful low-poly minimalist graphics and perhaps the most effective yet subtle sound design I’ve ever experienced in a game. I was greeted with an isometric grid in the style of mathematician Roger Penrose and artist M.C. Escher, architecture that, as Christina so elegantly put it in today’s class, feels like “made-up physics.” I was greeted with a tale of love between mother and daughter, navigating a dreamlike, desolate land filled with symbols and obscure religious allusions. I was greeted with a piece of what my friend Pedro calls “contemplative software,” disguised as a puzzle game. And it brought me calm.
M.C. Escher’s “Ascending and Descending” (1960) and The Penrose Staircase Illusion
As a designer, I often reflect on Mark Weiser’s concept of “calm technology”, technology that feels ubiquitous yet stays in the periphery of our attention. While this idea was groundbreaking, it came from a pre-smartphone world. Today, calm technology can also mean creating experiences that invite us to slow down, be mindful, and sustain attention – something increasingly rare in an age of distraction and fragmented focus. Monument Valley is precisely that: a surreal puzzle game crafted to anchor players in the present through thoughtful multimodal feedback and deeply emotional aesthetics.
How do the mechanics of the puzzles influence the experience of the game?
At first glance, the core mechanics of Monument Valley appear deceptively simple: rotate a building section or tap a destination for Princess Ida to walk toward. Yet these actions unfold into a profound interplay of perception, logic, and emotion. Rotation isn’t just about reorienting the world—it’s about reinterpreting it. Platforms that seem disconnected across different planes (y-axis) magically align through reframing, evoking paradoxical geometries. Other puzzle types, like kaleidoscope-style adjustments, reinforce this theme: space is not fixed, and meaning emerges from shifting perspective. This reframing mechanic is not merely spatial—it encourages a kind of cognitive flexibility that lies at the heart of lateral thinking.
What these mechanics enable is a constant dance between illusion and insight. By breaking the rules of physics, the game asks players to suspend their assumptions about dimensionality and movement. Even the delay between a user’s tap and Ida’s slow, deliberate movement becomes part of the puzzle: this interval forces patience, reflection, and a rhythm that feels almost meditative. Then, alternative puzzles (such as the kaleidoscopic pieces) balance the fatigue of larger-scale puzzles, mirroring the pacing seen in other games like Spider-Man PS4, where alternative puzzle modes are used to break up combat-heavy sections, giving players time to reset cognitively. Monument Valley uses its puzzles not to raise difficulty, but to deepen the experience of flow – a state of calm attention that feels more like guided contemplation than challenge for its own sake.
Spider-Man PS4 ‘Alternative Puzzle’ and kaleidoscope-style puzzle in Monument Valley
The sound design plays a critical role in reinforcing this sense of contemplative immersion. Played on my Mac without haptic feedback, I still felt deeply anchored in the environment through audio alone. The game’s feedback is layered: declarative sounds like rotating structures feature low-frequency creaks that intuitively signal scale and movement, while abstract sounds (such as chords broken into arpeggios) are mapped to spatial states. As you rotate a tower, for instance, each allowable step might trigger a tone, and completing the full arc plays a resolved musical phrase. This musicality does more than decorate the experience, it functions as a subtle guide, hinting when a structure is properly aligned or a movement is viable. Ida’s footsteps, faint and terrain-matching, evoke ASMR-like intimacy, making each step feel grounded even in a world where gravity bends to whim. Feedback isn’t about success or failure – it’s about reinforcing intuition through resonance, literally.
This slow, deliberate mechanic-sound interplay positions Monument Valley as an exemplar of “calm technology,” updated for the post-smartphone era. Where Weiser’s vision saw technology disappearing into the background, Monument Valley remains quietly present: drawing players in not with alerts or stimuli, but with tranquility and emotional warmth. It anchors attention without demanding it, offering a rare space for mindfulness.
Ethical Considerations
The elegance of Monument Valley‘s puzzles masks a set of quiet but important ethical assumptions. Unlike trivia-based puzzle games that clearly require prior knowledge, Monument Valley presents itself as universally accessible, language-free, culturally neutral, visually intuitive. But in practice, the game privileges a specific form of spatial and perceptual reasoning. It assumes that players can intuitively grasp impossible architectures, mentally rotate structures, and “see” connections across visual planes. This kind of embodied spatial intelligence is not equally distributed, and not everyone will find it intuitive to navigate optical illusions or reframe space in the way the game demands.
These assumptions risk excluding players with cognitive differences, especially those with dyslexia, dyspraxia, or other neurodivergent profiles that may affect spatial perception. The game’s puzzles also draw heavily on visual metaphors derived from Western art traditions, like M.C. Escher’s impossible shapes or Penrose stairs. For players unfamiliar with these visual conventions, the mechanics may feel arbitrary rather than magical. Even the musical feedback system – abstract arpeggios and harmonic resolution, relies on a sensitivity to tonal cues that may not resonate universally, particularly across cultures with different musical systems.
In designing a game that feels so serene and inclusive on the surface, the developers also risk obscuring the boundaries of that inclusivity. Ethical design isn’t just about avoiding explicit barriers, it’s about questioning what kinds of perception, cognition, and aesthetic familiarity are quietly being assumed. A truly inclusive version of Monument Valley might offer optional scaffolds: visual previews of rotational outcomes, alternate feedback modes for the hearing impaired, or puzzle variations that shift the challenge away from purely spatial reasoning. Without compromising its atmosphere, the game could extend its calm invitation to a broader audience – and in doing so, turn its illusion of universal accessibility into a reality.
