Monument Valley was developed by the independent London studio ustwo Games and was first released on iOS and Android platforms in 2014. It was later released on PC in the form of Monument Valley: Panoramic Edition in 2022. The game’s target audience spans all ages and levels of experience, particularly attracting mobile users who pursue visual aesthetics and emotional immersion.
However, what truly made Monument Valley stand out in the history of puzzle games was not its exquisite low-poly style, nor its breathtaking music and scenery, but a more fundamental design decision:
Narration is not carried out through text or voice-over, but directly woven into the mechanism of geometric reconstruction.
The player’s rotation and sliding of the building symbolize the protagonist Ida’s psychological process of reconstructing order, facing the consequences, and seeking redemption. Puzzles are not obstacles to narrative, but rather the narrative itself.
From the perspective of the MDA framework, the intricacies of this design are highly informative. When the design team talked about the ideas, they said: “The idea for Monument Valley came from art. Wong wanted to create a game out of M.C. Escher’s Ascending and Descending lithograph print, simply about climbing impossible architecture.”(https://www.gamesindustry.biz/reaching-a-broader-audience-with-games-that-have-meaning)
From this, it can be seen that at the mechanics, the core interaction of the game is extremely simple: clicking on the ground to guide Ida to move, dragging or rotating specific environmental elements (such as blocks) to change the building structure. Rotating the cylinder, translating the platform, and using M.C. Escher’s perspective illusion to connect originally disconnected pathways – all of these operations form the foundation of the entire gameplay. The dynamics generated from this, as the design team stated, are a process in which players repeatedly try and make mistakes, constantly discover new viewpoints and perspectives, and actively break through the limitations of knowledges of three-dimensional physics in an “impossible space”. The game adopts an isometric projection, and players must no longer view the structure as a three-dimensional physical object, but as a two-dimensional isometric drawing. The ultimate aesthetic experience is a mixture of Wonder, Serenity, and the emotional redemption brought about by geometric alignment. Here, the perspective itself becomes the mechanism, and every rotation is a narrative progression.
Placing Monument Valley in the lineage of puzzle games highlights its uniqueness even more.
Compared with traditional logic-driven puzzle games such as The Witness or Portal, Monument Valley intentionally reduces frustration and lowers the threshold for rigorous logical reasoning, shifting the focus from “breaking rules” to “perceptual space”. It does not require players to deduce from complex causal chains, but invites them to find a way out through an aesthetic feast. Compared with FEZ, which also uses visual illusions, the interaction in Monument Valley is more intuitive, linear, and minimalist. FEZ requires players to frequently switch between 2D and 3D perspectives to explore and collect. Each level in Monument Valley is a ‘small world’ that serves a poetic personal narrative rather than an open space exploration.
However, this exquisite design also implies some kind of “inside-the-box” assumption.
Monument Valley assumes that players have the ability to read isometric projection and familiarity with the spatial convention that two-dimensional images represent three-dimensional space. The game heavily relies on color and spatial visual illusions to construct puzzles, which inevitably excludes visually impaired players, those who heavily rely on non-visual information, and those who are insensitive to geometric spatial transformations. This is also a special linguistic manifestation: every interactive language silently selects its readers. When a game weaves narrative into geometry, it also delineates an invisible boundary: only those who know how to read this geometry can hear its story.
Overall, Monument Valley uses geometric transformations for storytelling. During the process of solving puzzles, players can also understand what the protagonist Ida is doing: searching for the only way through the broken world. This narrative style, which does not completely rely on text and narration, represents the core concept of this game: the mechanic is the narrative.
