Monument Valley is more than a game, it’s a meditation in motion. Created by Ustwo Games, it’s a puzzle experience designed around perspective, architecture, and quiet emotional storytelling, and is suitable for all ages. As someone who loves geometry, minimalism, and buildings that defy logic, spending $4 on this app felt like buying a tiny pocket museum.
You play as Ida, a silent princess navigating impossible structures. With no real dialogue or exposition, Monument Valley invites you to feel your way through. Its puzzles aren’t pasted on, they emerge organically from the space itself. What Scott Kim and Bob Bates call environmental puzzles, Monument Valley excels at. You don’t stop to solve a puzzle, you continue forward by understanding how the environment works.
Mechanics
Fig 1
In one of the levels (see Fig. 1), I found myself facing two towers suspended in a soft yellow mist. The path forward seemed impossible, until I realized that rotating platforms would cause staircases to align from the right angle, creating new walkable routes. This is a classic example of what Bob Bates calls an “unusual use of an object” puzzle: stairs and architecture behave in ways that defy real-world physics but make perfect sense within the logic of the game. Monument Valley’s core mechanic, perspective manipulation, relies heavily on perceptual shift puzzles, where the solution emerges only once you change how you see the environment. Importantly, the game offers no explicit instructions. It embraces interaction as teaching, allowing players to experiment and learn through direct feedback. The result isn’t pressure, but calm curiosity. Each level is like a spatial haiku, encouraging players to slow down, explore, and trust that their perspective will eventually unlock the way forward.
Monument Valley’s aesthetic design is a triumph of clarity and emotion. The color palette is soft and restrained, pastel blues, corals, and creams. The architecture feels inspired by Islamic geometry, and modernist structures, which for someone obsessed with pattern and spatial problem-solving, was incredibly satisfying. (see Fig 2)
Fig 2
The sound design is equally important: each action triggers a subtle chime or hum, creating a sensory feedback loop that makes interactions feel intentional and musical. These formal elements, color, movement, and sound, aren’t just decorative. They guide your intuition and help scaffold your understanding of new mechanics, step by step.
Ida moves slowly and gracefully, and while you can’t control her speed, that limitation is part of the design. You’re not supposed to rush. You’re supposed to see. That’s what makes Monument Valley such a distinct experience: the mechanics aren’t there to challenge your reflexes, they exist to sharpen your perception.
Ethics
While Monument Valley appears widely accessible due to its lack of language or cultural references, it quietly assumes players have certain kinds of knowledge, like comfort with touchscreen gestures, visual-spatial reasoning, and learning through trial and error. These assumptions include tech-savvy, neurotypical players but exclude those who rely on explicit instructions, have cognitive differences, or need accessibility tools like screen readers or alternate input methods. By not offering guidance or customization, the game unintentionally narrows its audience. A more inclusive design might offer optional narrated hints or adaptable control settings to welcome a wider range of players into its meditative world.
For me, Monument Valley was worth every cent. I played it on my macbook and I kid you not, I could not stop. It challenged me not through frustration, but through perspective, teaching me to see differently, to pause, to rotate my assumptions. The puzzles felt like architectural poems, and solving them gave me that “aha!” thrill Scott Kim describes, the satisfaction of perceptual shift. The game doesn’t scream. It whispers. And in that quiet, it asks something bold: What if the answer isn’t more effort, but a new perspective?
I give Monument Valley a 10/10, not because it was perfect for everyone, but because it showed me a perfect blend of puzzle, space, and self.
**Boldened terms are course contents from readings and class.
