Monument Valley is a puzzle game developed by Ustwo Games for mobile devices. The player plays as Princess Ida as she navigates various monuments and learns more about their “sacred geometry.” Because of its compelling story, engaging puzzles, and comforting mood, I would say this game is targeted at players who like to cozy up and lose themselves — in a story and in a challenge. That being said, the puzzles themselves tend to be more illuminating than challenging. The physical puzzle’s groundedness gives them an intuitive quality and elicits sensory satisfaction, but their fantastical properties make solving them a novel, intriguing experience; furthermore, this physical yet impossible dichotomy helps shape the game’s narrative.
The puzzles are physical, which makes navigating them more intuitive and succeeding in them more satisfying. We have a lot of experience with physical objects and navigating space, so the puzzle is easier both to understand and to solve; we need fewer instructions on where we are and aren’t allowed to move (i.e. we can’t walk off a platform and float across space) and we have a strong intuition for how to get from A to B — it draws upon similar spatial awareness and visual planning skills as navigating a crowded hallway. Physical puzzles elicit a sensory experience; feeling the small click as two pieces connect is satisfying and rewarding. The physical representation and manipulation of puzzles in Monument Valley successfully recreates this feeling digitally. In the below pictures for example, the control on the bottom of the darker gray piece spins said piece freely; something about the physicality, the geometry, the precision of aligning these rigid, rectangular shapes produces a sensation wonderfully akin to something tactile.
Despite spatial relationships generally being familiar to us, this space behaves completely differently than the ones we inhabit, making the game exciting and stretching our thinking. As you may have observed in the previous examples, the game’s monuments obey different laws of physics than ours. When we render 3D space in 2 dimensions, there is some ambiguity. Monument Valley takes advantage of that to produce some surreal spaces. In the first picture below, the corner of that elbow shaped piece could be above the foreground or behind it. Rotating it, which the player has the ability to do, changes which of those perspectives it functions in. Another physical oddity of Monument Valley: the player is not always gravitational pulled downward — the direction of gravity changes — as seen in the second picture below. This surreal environment makes the puzzles’ possibilities feel endless; we, as players, question every physical property we think we can rely on and are excited by each new violation the game introduces. It makes the puzzles exceptionally interesting despite their relative ease because we have to change our way of thinking, the mark of a great puzzle.
From a narrative perspective, the puzzle’s having a physical space makes it more immersive while the fantasy of that space makes it compelling. In Monument Valley, the puzzle is the game. The game is just puzzle after puzzle. So, it may seem impossible that that flow might also tell a story. But, Monument Valley does so with its design of space. Playing a character is a somewhat rare thing within a puzzle. In Monument Valley you are not externally manipulating some system toward success; you play a character who is inside, is part of, the puzzle. This makes the arbitrary structures around you a world and solving the otherwise arbitrary puzzle your character’s goal, her escape, her story. The monuments’ architecture then establishes a surreal quality that triggers your curiosity and draws you into her story. Because your little character clearly isn’t human, because this space clearly isn’t Earth, you are eager to learn more.
Monument Valley is a wonderful puzzle game that demonstrates how a puzzle can contribute to a story and be entertaining; but, it is really this creation of space, this one dynamic, in Monument Valley that is so masterful you would want to play even if the puzzle was easy and the story was lame. That is quite impressive.
Ethics:
Monument Valley attempts (and in my case, at least, succeeds) in expanding your thinking — making you think outside the box — about physical space. Interestingly the gameplay does not require that you have some particular prior understanding of space or physics (because it has its own unique set of laws) but I think the enjoyment might. Most of my enjoyment of Monument Valley came from having my mind blown by the way it subverted my previous understanding of physical space, so I wonder how the aesthetics, outside of the dynamics, might change based on people’s prior knowledge of space or physics. How would a non-seeing person’s understanding of space, which is likely different from mine, be challenged by this game — would adapting it for that audience necessarily mean the same mechanics, or would it mean aiming for the same aesthetic of revelation and illumination? Additionally, space and physics seem like such universal laws of nature, but I wonder if different cultures have different perspectives of them that may shape, once again their aesthetic not mechanical, experience of this game.
