I’ve always found the Monument Valley games slightly frustrating, because they’re beautiful, creative things that don’t seem to have that much room for the player. They’re quietly misleading in this regard. With their fixed viewpoints, Persian influence and love of Escher-like geometry, they look like perfect brain-teasy puzzle games. In reality they’re more akin to the likes of Uncharted than they are something along the lines of Echochrome or Crush. The plan is all laid out for you and you can’t really deviate from it. Hit your marks, know your place, and save your sense of wonder for all the visual tricks the developers are playing on you.
Monument Valley 3 reviewDeveloper: Ustwo GamesPublisher: NetflixPlatform: Played on iOSAvailability: Out 10th December on Netflix Games (via iOS and Android)
This in part came down to the design, which has offered two main kinds of puzzles in the past. There was one in which you would use trick perspectives to create impossible paths – if two planes looked like they lined up in this world, you could treat them as if they actually did. Then there was another in which you’d interact with a switch or a sliding doodad or a twisty thing and the world would transform around you. The little minarets and towertops the game played out on would curl up, split apart, invert themselves and you’d be left with new doodads to mess around with.
This stuff was unfailingly elegant and beautiful to watch, but in a game about getting from A to B on each screen, it meant you were at the mercy of how energetic the designers were feeling. You couldn’t really read the landscape and plot a path across it because you didn’t know what the landscape was capable of doing at any single point. You were along for the ride, and that feels sub-optimal in a game like this, even if it’s a very pretty ride.
Monument Valley 3 – Official Announce Trailer Watch on YouTube
That’s why I found the first two Monument Valleys frustrating. The third one strikes me as being frustrating because it has all the problems of the first two, until it suddenly doesn’t anymore. You get a couple of levels where new ideas come in and they’re as playful and expressive and fun to tinker with as you could hope. And then the game’s over – for now. It concludes just as it feels like it’s getting started.