For this week’s Critical Play, I played Monument Valley, a mobile puzzle game developed by ustwo games for iOS and Android devices. I downloaded it on the App Store and played on my Macbook. The game’s audience are casual players, puzzle fans, and people drawn to visually aesthetic games. You play as a silent princess named Ida and guide her through a series of impossible monuments by manipulating architecture and perspective to create pathways that should not logically exist.
I’ve always been more of a puzzle game person. One of my favorite games is the New York Times crossword, because I love the feeling of slowly piecing together a solution and suddenly seeing how everything fits. So, I really loved getting to experience the same feelings while playing Monument Valley, but spatially instead of semantically. Monument Valley’s core mechanic is simply rotating structures, moving platforms, and shifting perspectives, so Ida can walk through the environment. Despite this simplicity in available actions, it allows the player to create surreal and impossible architectures that Ida can suddenly traverse. This produces dynamics of experimentation, uncertainty, and revelation, which in turn create aesthetics of wonder and satisfaction.
One of the things I really enjoyed about the game’s design is how gradually it teaches the player its logic. Early levels ease you into the physics of the world before introducing more surreal mechanics. At first, the puzzles are straightforward. You rotate towers to connect visible staircases or raise platforms to create paths. But eventually the game introduces Escher-like perspective tricks where two disconnected platforms become connected because they visually align from the camera’s perspective. This connects to one of the secondary functions of architecture Henry Jenkins lays out: surrealism. The physics and architecture of the world feel similar enough to our world to feel somewhat recognizable but some things are slightly “off” in ways that constantly remind the player that they are operating in a different world governed by unfamiliar rules. This creates a really interesting dynamic where you are constantly questioning the environment itself and searching for new ways to look at it.
The game also uses architectural concepts like constraint and concealment. In most levels, you only get access to one part of the puzzle at a time, which forces you to understand the space in pieces rather than all at once. For example, in the “box” level, Ida is enclosed inside a giant cube that contains three internal rooms that don’t seem like they should physically fit inside it. You guide her through these spaces one at a time, activating three separate lights in order to progress. This design uses constraint as a mechanic. The architecture limits what you can see and access, and concealment hides the full structure of the puzzle until you manipulate it.
Or, on some levels, you often hit what feels like a dead end, only to realize the environment can be manipulated in a way you hadn’t considered. I was stuck for a minute on one of the first levels because I couldn’t rotate or move anything to create a path for Ida. Eventually I realized that you had to just change the camera angle to connect two platforms, which let Ida walk across it. That “aha” moment felt incredibly satisfying because the solution emerged directly from interacting with the architecture. I added this trick to my toolbox for the game moving forward.
That feeling of revelation is probably the game’s strongest aesthetic achievement. The puzzles are challenging enough that some had me stumped for a while, but the game rarely feels frustrating because interacting with the world is satisfying in itself. Rotating towers, sliding blocks, and unfolding staircases all felt really smooth and tactical. Even if you don’t get anywhere, it feels pleasant because experimentation is visually and auditorially rewarding. Sometimes, when I got stuck, I would just spin one of the handles endlessly because I liked the sounds and music it produced. Ironically, this playful experimentation is how I discovered that some handles can rotate beyond 360 degrees to create entirely new pathways. I initially assumed the mechanics would follow real-world logic, so I would have remained stuck if the game had not encouraged me to keep interacting with the environment for its own sake. This reinforces one of Monument Valley’s central ideas: this world does not operate according to normal architectural or physical rules. Through the MDA framework, the mechanics encourage playful experimentation, which creates dynamics of discovery and eventually produces an aesthetic of elegance, wonder, and surprise.
I also think the game succeeds because it stays relatively concise. Mechanically, the puzzles never become overwhelmingly complex, which helps maintain the game’s calm atmosphere. At the same time, I do think this creates one weakness: the overall experience felt a little emotionally underwhelming by the end. I enjoyed uncovering each new monument and learning new mechanics, but the narrative payoff did not feel as impactful as the mechanical journey. Part of this is probably intentional. Monument Valley prioritizes atmosphere and puzzle interaction over deep narrative immersion. The result is a game that feels beautiful and meditative, but slightly fleeting.
Ethics
The ethics question for this week asks what knowledge the game expects players to have in order to succeed. Monument Valley actually assumes quite a lot. The puzzles rely heavily on spatial reasoning skills and comfort with abstract visual manipulation. The game also draws heavily from surrealist and Escher-inspired visual language. Players unfamiliar with perspective illusions or abstract puzzle logic may struggle more because the game asks you to reject normal assumptions about architecture and physics.
This made me reflect on how my own background shaped my experience. As a Stanford student with two engineering degrees, I’ve had a lot of exposure to spatial reasoning problems, visual abstraction, and perspective-based thinking. I also already knew about Escher-style illusions before playing the game. Because of that, many of the mechanics felt intuitive to me after a while. But someone without that background might experience the puzzles very differently. The game never explicitly teaches concepts like impossible geometry; it assumes players can learn them through experimentation.
That is not necessarily a flaw, but it does show how puzzle games can unintentionally privilege certain forms of knowledge and cognition. Game mechanics are never neutral and honestly, any type of design itself is never neutral. These things shape who feels comfortable, capable, or included in a game space. Monument Valley’s puzzles are beautiful partly because they reward a very specific way of seeing the world.
