There’s a moment in Chapter 3 of Monument Valley that I keep coming back to. Princess Ida is on a vertical sliding platform that can rise to different heights. The obvious move is to climb to the ledge on the left, but that’s a dead end. The actual solution involves lowering the slider, moving across to a second slider on the right, and climbing up to reach the next button. Once solved, the trick seems obvious, but it’s a clear example of what the game does throughout: it pushes back against the click-everything impulse puzzle games encourage and asks whether the player has actually understood the space.
Monument Valley (MV from here) is a puzzle game by Ustwo Games on iOS, Android, and Windows. The player guides Princess Ida through dreamlike isometric landscapes by manipulating the space (via passages, stairs, levers, sliders, doors) to take her from start to finish. Chapters have short narrative titles (“Chapter III: The Hidden Temple, in which Ida has an unexpected encounter”) and most split into sub-levels: individual buildings revealed to be connected as Ida traverses them. The App Store rates it 4+, but the contemplative themes and lack of hand-holding make it closer to a 10+ game in practice.
Plastic Space as a Central Design Move
What makes MV distinctive as a design object is its treatment of space and perspective as plastic. The natural reference is M.C. Escher: the puzzles ask you to question the spatial rules you’ve operated under your whole llife anddo it by giving you control over both Ida and the landscape she walks on.
Recalibrating spatial intuition can easily tip into frustration, so MV structures it in careful increments. Chapter 2 introduces a lever that rotates parts of the landscape, and the rotatable sections are marked only by slightly darker shading, training the player to read subtle artistic clues rather than wait for explicit instructions. The same chapter brings in push buttons that alter geometry, plus stairs and ladders.
Chapter 3 is where things open up. Doors teleport Ida between corners of a landscape, and sliders carry her along vertical and horizontal axes. The slider misdirection puzzle I opened with lives here, and it shifts what a slider is in the player’s mental model: not just transport between fixed ledges, but a possible ledge in its own right.
Chapters 4 and 5 layer time onto space. Chapter 5 introduces the Crow People, a patrolling figures that block Ida when their paths cross hers. The puzzle gains a temporal axis: when to cross, when to dodge, when to avoid them entirely by rotating the building, shifting the path, or summoning a staircase to bypass them.
The atmosphere provides support
The art direction reinforces the puzzle design rather than competing with it. Landscapes are built from clean lines with ample negative space around the central structure. Each chapter is locationally distinct, such as The Water Palace and The Spire, with shifting color palettes and background elements (foliage, ambient color) giving each its own identity. The whole thing feels introspective and faintly surreal, which is exactly the tone a game challenging spatial rules wants to strike.
The narrative is conveyed between chapters by a mysterious figure: “For a long time, these bones have waited in the darkness… How far have you wandered, silent princess? Why are you here?” The vagueness matches the visual minimalism, and there’s a real case for this: the less specific the story, the easier it is for the player to identify with Ida.
That said, I’m not fully convinced. There’s a designer assumption here that every element should hold to one aesthetic, narratively and visually, and I think it underestimates what a more concrete story could achieve in a minimalist visual frame. If Ida had actually met a water nymph in the Water Palace, or if The Spire centered on an entrapment narrative tied to its towers, the theme of “forgiveness” might land less abstractly. As it stands, the player asks “forgiveness for what?” and has to connect it to their own life. A more concrete plot could foster empathy on its own.
Ethics: The landscape changes for Ida
The most interesting ethical move in MV is the framing of lateral thinking itself. Instead of asking Ida to adapt to the environment, the game asks the environment to change for her. Viewed this way, MV functions as a disability ethics game, one that challenges the dominant view of physically disabled people as the thing needing fixing, and points to the environment as what hasn’t been built to accommodate them. This matters in a game whose mechanics rely on stairs and ladders, so structures typically inaccessible to disabled players.
It’s worth considering how MV would change if those structures were replaced with truly accessible alternatives like ramps instead of stairs, which could introduce their own gravity and balance challenges. The game also assumes visual acuity and motor dexterity that a zoom function could meaningfully address. Nevertheless, MV is a case where the game’s underlying ethos does more ethical work than its literal representation, even when both stay implicit.
