For this critical play analysis, I played Monument Valley II by Ustwo on an iPhone (thank you Netflix mode for the free version). Monument Valley II is a puzzle-adventure mobile game with a minimalist design that follows the emotional journey of a mother (Ro) and her child through surreal landscapes. Designed with a broad casual audience in mind, particularly mobile users who enjoy visually pleasing and/or meditative experiences, the game leverages elegant visuals and simple touch controls to prioritize aesthetics and emotional resonance. To play Monument Valley II as a feminist is to appreciate its symbolic attempt to center a mother-daughter relationship, but a critical lens reveals that the game often misses deeper opportunities for feminist engagement, particularly in its mechanics and narrative agency, by relying on aesthetic symbolism rather than structural empowerment or subversion.
Figure 1: Display of Mother-Daughter Relationship
Monument Valley II primarily delivers the aesthetics of Narrative, Discovery, and Submission. Players are immersed in the gentle unfolding of a quiet, almost wordless, story as they guide Ro and her child through optical illusions and shifting landscapes. This narrative structure supports feminist themes by disrupting the dominant trope of male protagonists and centralizes maternal love and caregiving. Creating Sacred Geometry is implied to be a magical art that’s passed down from mother to daughter, establishing a feminine power structure that directly counters patriarchal gaming traditions identified by scholars like Carly Kocurek. This design choice aligns with Katherine Cross’s advocacy for games that challenge traditional narratives—here, the puzzle-solving becomes a metaphor for the complex negotiations of mother-daughter relationships rather than conquest or competition. However, while the mechanics offer spatial puzzles and visual storytelling, they fail to empower the player with narrative choices or deeper interaction with the characters’ internal worlds. The lack of player agency limits the dynamics and limits the game’s ability to enact feminist design ethos in its systems. As Katherine Cross argues, feminist storytelling in games requires more than symbolic representation, it needs mechanics that reflect care, complexity, and transformation.
Figure 2: Example Puzzle with Mother and Daughter
The game’s narrative is evocative and well-scored, though it offers an emotionally linear experience that lacks intersectional perspective or mechanical depth. While the mother-daughter relationship challenges the male-centric narratives that dominate games, the player’s interaction is still confined to manipulating geometry and progressing through a set story. Kishonna Gray’s critique of “inclusion within toxicity” is relevant here: what good is representation if it doesn’t challenge the structures of traditional play? Ro and her daughter may be present as characters, but their emotional growth is not reflected through gameplay. The player is not asked to think critically about caregiving, gender roles, or generational knowledge; instead, they are guided through a largely aesthetic experience. This suggests a missed opportunity for Monument Valley II to fully engage with the radical potential of feminist play, which emphasizes cooperation, interdependence, and community-driven change.
To truly embody feminist game design principles, Monument Valley II could benefit from several mechanical and structural changes. The game could introduce asymmetrical abilities between mother and daughter that reflect different generational perspectives and skills, moving beyond the current model where both characters function similarly. This would encourage cooperative play strategies and highlight the evolution of identity across age and experience. Adding community-building mechanics (ex. allowing players to share created geometric patterns or collaborative puzzle solution) would align with feminist values of collective action rather than individual achievement, shifting the game from a solitary experience to a networked one. The aesthetic could also expand to include diverse cultural geometric traditions, drawing from other cultural architectural practices rather than the current Eurocentric minimalism. Most importantly, the game could incorporate mechanics of growth and change that reflect the reality of evolving relationships, perhaps allowing the daughter to eventually become a teacher herself. This cyclical structure would mirror feminist theories of interconnected rather than hierarchical progress, transforming the narrative from a simple arc to a generational loop that centers shared wisdom and mutual growth.
In summary, Monument Valley II is a visually stunning, emotionally resonant game that takes a meaningful step toward centering women and caregiving in its narrative. However, its feminist potential is undercut by a lack of systemic depth. By introducing asymmetrical character dynamics, communal creation features, and more culturally diverse aesthetics, the game could align its mechanics with its themes, creating an experience that is not just about motherhood but actively enacts feminist values. These changes would transform Monument Valley II from a beautiful but limited representation of feminist storytelling into a game that uses its core systems to imagine new, inclusive possibilities for what play, and care, can look like.
