Monument Valley 2
Creator: ustwo Games
Platform: mobile + console
Audience: casual mobile players drawn to short, meditative puzzle sessions
Monument Valley 2 tells a story about a mother named Ro who teaches her daughter how to navigate the world, sends her away to grow up, and is eventually reunited with her as an adult. I think the feminist achievement here is the narrative because it refuses the climactic structures that define most mainstream games and puts caregiving and inheritance at the center instead of the background. I think the mechanics do important work in supporting the narrative, but they stop short of completing the feminist argument the story is making. There is a clear gap between what the narrative attempts and what the puzzles let the player actually do.
Chess argues that mainstream games inherit an orgasmic narrative structure, building toward a single decisive climax that resolves everything, while feminist storytelling tends to live in the slow unfolding rather than the explosive arrival. Monument valley embodies this by moving through fourteen chapters of teaching, separation, memory, and gradual reunion, and its emotional peaks are quiet ones. The biggest moment in the entire game is a wordless hug in the final chapter, which lands as a deliberate refusal of the difficulty-curve + final-boss arc the puzzle genre often defaults to.
The mechanics back this up by refusing almost every affordance that would pull the experience toward Challenge as an aesthetic. There’s no fail state, no timer, no enemy, and no penalty for a wrong path. I think the dynamic this produces is closer to Discovery and Submission, where the player wanders through impossible Escher-style architecture looking for the angle from which two non-adjacent surfaces will connect. The chapter-level shifts in playable character do similar supporting work. In the early levels your tap moves Ro while her daughter trails her automatically. After a sailboat carries the daughter away in Chapter VI, the game hands her to the player for several chapters, during which she visibly grows into an adult, literally blossoming out of a flower in the orchard. By the final chapter, both characters accept independent taps as separate input targets, and this is the only level in the entire game where both are controlled at once. The story tells you the daughter is becoming independent, and the control scheme lets you watch it happen.
At the same time, I think the mechanics fall short in the puzzles themselves. Each chamber resolves through one valid configuration of staircases, rotations, and aligned platforms, and the player’s role is to find that configuration rather than to choose between several. The sacred geometry drawing at the end of most chapters is the one moment where the game lets the player actually express something, since the pattern is determined entirely by the player’s swipes. That single moment per chapter sits inside a larger structure where the player decides when to act much more often than what to do. Chess argues that mechanics function as agentic-training tools, that practicing agency in a game is connected to practicing it in the world. A game whose story is about handing down the power to act needs its puzzles to give the player meaningful choice in how they act, and Monument Valley 2 mostly just does not.
Ro and her daughter also have no race, language, class, or setting outside the abstract monuments. The defense the game offers is that abstraction makes the story universal, but Chess and Shaw both push back on this move because universality in mainstream design has historically meant the default, and the default has historically meant white, Western, and middle-class. The mother passes down sacred geometry, but no actual geometric tradition appears anywhere. The narrative’s feminism would land harder if it were located in a real cultural inheritance rather than a generic one, because intersectional specificity is what separates feminist storytelling from feminist mood.
Overall I think the daughter’s solo chapters should offer branching puzzle solutions where two or three valid configurations exist and resolve the level in subtly different ways. This could show that her growing independence becomes something the player watches her choose rather than something the game announces. Chess’s whole argument about agency depends on the player practicing choice, and a daughter who visibly chooses her own path through a puzzle enacts the feminist independence the narrative keeps trying to describe. I also think the mirror mechanic should be replaced with some kind of asymmetric coordination, where Ro and the daughter are on different architectures and each need to perform an action the other cannot reach. This would force the player to plan across two roles, which is closer to the actual labor of teaching and being taught than a passive copy mechanic and which respects the daughter as a separate agent rather than an extension of her mother’s input. I think these changes would help the mechanics carry as much of the feminist argument as the story does.
Playing Monument Valley 2 as a feminist, for me, meant giving the narrative full credit for centering caregiving and inheritance and recognizing that the mechanics succeed mostly by staying out of the way. I think the game intertwines with Chess’s feminist theory most clearly in its rejection of climax-driven narrative, its refusal of Challenge-driven aesthetics, and its slow handover of the playable character from mother to daughter. Where I think it fails is on Chess’s argument about mechanics as agentic-training tools. The puzzles give the player almost no real choice in how to act and abstracts Ro and her daughter out of any specific cultural location. Letting the daughter visibly choose her own path enacts the agency the narrative keeps describing, and grounding the matrilineal inheritance in a real tradition would give feminism somewhere actual to live.
