Monument Valley by Ustwo Games is a simple but beautiful puzzle game originally developed for mobile operating systems (I played on iPad OS), but now available on Windows and consoles as well. The game consists almost solely of a series of perspective-bending puzzles the player must solve to finish each stage. I argue that the mechanics of the puzzles in the game create a uniquely disorienting gameplay experience, achieved through spatiality.
There are many kinds of puzzle you might encounter in life, but a select few kinds make up the majority of the ones you’ll find in a video game. The “standard” puzzle game, descendent of the original text adventures and later point and click adventures, will have you picking up objects and interacting with them, in usual or perhaps unusual ways. You might have to look for clues to a password or code, solve riddles, or connect wires in the right sequence. Bob Bates covers all of these types and more in “Designing the Puzzle”, and players might expect a puzzle game to fit neatly within his categorizations (most games do). Monument Valley‘s gameplay exists, in contrast, in a relatively underutilized and combinatory space. Stages are mazes, undeniably, but it is not just a matter of finding the exit (in fact, the doors are often obvious) or locating the path to get there, but actually creating it. There is some element of what Bob calls “sequence puzzles”; you must often twist a crank to raise or lower a platform before you can walk onto it, and often you must get to a certain spot before you rotate the space so that, once rotated, you are where you need to be. These maze and sequence elements are definitely important to making the puzzles work; yet, just by combining them, you do not achieve the thing that makes Monument Valley‘s puzzles so special: spatiality. Monument Valley does not hide the path or exit from you; there are no shadows or hidden passageways. Everything is fully accessible to you, so long as you can wrap your head around what you’re seeing.
One of the first truly mind-bending moments in the game mimics a famous work by M.C. Escher
There is no way to progress in Monument Valley other than to grapple with the spaces the game has presented to you. In most video games, movement is simple; in 3D, you move in four-ish horizonal directions, and maybe jump and crouch. In 2D, you move left and right, either head-on (Super Mario Bros., platformers) or top-down (Space Invaders, shmups). Even in traditional isometric games, which offer unique perspectives (Sonic 3D Blast), the perspective itself is fixed. The player always knows where they can and can’t go; a wall is always a wall, a floor is always a floor. Gravity will always bring you back down. Monument Valley throws these ideas out the window. There is no fixed perspective, no globalized gravity, and no simple directional movement. You can move your character to any surface you see, so long as it’s directly connected to the one they are currently on. In some perspective, two platforms may be disconnected and separated by a great vertical distance; yet, by rotating the space or the surfaces themselves, you may find a perspective in which they form a perfectly usable bridge to the exit. The puzzles in the game are most often controlled by rotating cranks and revolving platforms. Rather than having distinct “on/off” states, these controllable elements can spin forever, cycling through the perspectives available to you to the point of nausea.
Monument Valley requires the player to forget everything they know about real-world spatial relationships and be willing to accept impossible (but never inconsistent) architecture. This unique and disorienting way of presenting the game’s environmental puzzles, endlessly shifting, connecting and disconnecting, perfectly blends the puzzles with the impossible geometry the game is based around.
Monument Valley seems to be prior-knowledge-proof at first glance. There’s about as few words in the game as possible. There is only one control, tapping on the screen; maybe two if you count dragging separately. To play, enjoy, and beat the game, you don’t need to have any special knowledge or training. However, it’s well-established that a player’s enjoyment of puzzle games depends heavily on the difficulty balance of the puzzles. Therefore, we must consider what kind of knowledge could change the (experienced) difficulty of the puzzles. While Monument Valley does not explicitly require prior knowledge, many of its mechanics (all of which lack explicit tutorial or explanation) will likely be familiar to seasoned gamers. Mechanics like stepping on pressure plates, turning gears, and entering doorways to progress are not impossible to intuit, but they will likely be automatic or at least easily recognizable to people who have played many games before (puzzle or otherwise). Therefore, Monument Valley may be more time-consuming and difficult for players who are less experienced with some of these mechanic conventions, and it’s important to consider the overlap of gaming experience and player demographics.
