Monument Valley II, is developed by ustwo games and played on mobile, is best suited for players who enjoy quiet puzzle games, storytelling through visuals, and emotional experiences that don’t depend on combat. It follows a mother, Ro, as she guides her child through impossible architecture. Monument Valley II can be seen as feminist because it makes care, guidance, and letting go central to play players experience, but its feminism is limited by how it attaches that care to motherhood, making emotional labor feel naturally maternal rather than socially shared.
The game’s strongest design is that care is a mechanic. In many puzzle games, the player’s goal is mastery in control the space, solve the room, move forward. The player rotates buildings, slides platforms, opens paths, and moves Ro through this architectural space, but the emotional weight comes from arranging the world so someone else can pass through it. I was not just solving the architecture puzzle, but it felt like I was fostering and guiding a relationship.
This connects to Shira Chess’s argument in Play Like a Feminist that games can become “agentic-training tools.” That a mechanic is not just an action. In Monument Valley II, agency is not expressed through violence or domination, but through making space for another person. The player’s agency is relational. I act, but my swipes and clicks matters because it changes what Ro and her child can do together.
The MDA framework makes this clearer. The mechanics are spatial manipulation, movement, perspective tricks, and guiding characters through levels. The dynamics that emerge are patience, protection, separation, and reunion. The aesthetics are discovery, sensation, narrative, and even though the game is single-player. That fellowship is not between two human players. It exists between Ro and her child, and by extension between the player and the relationship the game asks us to maintain.
There are no enemies to defeat and no resources to optimize. The game does not make care secondary to “real” gameplay. It teaches care through interaction: wait, guide, make room, and sometimes stop controlling. Even as someone outside the direct experience of motherhood, I could understand the game’s argument because it was built into what my hands were doing.
The architecture is what makes that lesson work. Monument Valley II does not tell its story through long dialogue or explicit exposition. It uses space as narrative. The impossible buildings are not just puzzle boxes. They express the emotional structure of caregiving. When Ro and her child move together, the world feels intimate. When the architecture splits them apart, the puzzle becomes about distance and trust.
This is one of the game’s strongest feminist moments because it complicates care. Care is not only protection. Sometimes care means allowing another person to move independently. The player feels this because the space physically prevents Ro from always being next to her child. The game turns letting go into something spatial. I did not just understand separation as a story beat. I had to solve it.
Compared to Florence, another short mobile game about relationships and emotional growth, Monument Valley II is less direct but more architectural. Florence uses everyday interactions, like brushing teeth, texting, and moving objects, to make intimacy playable. Monument Valley II uses geometry to make caregiving playable. Both games challenge the idea that meaningful play has to be violent, competitive, or traditionally difficult. Chess argues that feminist games do not need to be overt manifestos and how they can also reshape what games are allowed to feel like.
The abstraction makes care feel beautiful, where every level is clean, elegant, and emotionally pulled. But that beauty also softens harder questions. Feminist critique should not only celebrate care. It should ask who is expected to provide care, who benefits from it, and whether that labor is shared. In Monument Valley II, care is mostly framed through a mother-child relationship. That can be moving, but it also risks reinforcing the idea that emotional labor belongs naturally to mothers.
This is where the game’s feminism feels limited. Ro’s care is patient, graceful, and almost effortless. The game rarely shows care as tiring, unfairly expected, or socially imposed. A more expansive feminist version could preserve the emotional beauty while showing care through community, friendship, or shared responsibility. It could also include puzzles where the child helps Ro more directly, or where multiple figures carry responsibility together. That would make care feel less one-directional and less tied to a single maternal role.
The game gestures toward this when the child begins to move more independently. Looking above, the child figures out how to get to Ro’s level. These moments are powerful because they suggest that good care does not create dependence forever. It creates the conditions for someone else to become capable. Ro’s role is not to hold the child in place, but to help the child move through the world.
Monument Valley II matters because it expands what games are allowed to treat as important. Chess argues that changing games requires changing who plays them, who makes them, and what kinds of play the medium values. This game participates in that project by making patience, attention, and relational responsibility feel worthy of design. It would be more convincing if it valued care without making motherhood the main container for it.
However, Monument Valley II succeeds because its mechanic and message are closely aligned. The player rotates the world not to conquer it, but to make passage possible. Its softness is doing real design work here. The critique is not that the game focuses on motherhood, but the feminist play asks us to value care while also questioning why care so often appears as a mother’s natural duty.
