Monument Valley

I was told about Monument Valley quite a while ago - and warned it was pretty short. On sale at 49p, that is not a terrible price for a few hours of enjoyment and it is apparently a pretty clever game. It has also been ludicrously well received with plenty of awards and lots of sales - a rarity in these freemium times.

The point of Monument Valley is to use the 2D image to pass over a 3D space and in that sense it reminded me of Echochrome (a fairly early era PS3 game by SCEJ which allowed you to traverse the paths with a change of perspective) rather a lot. Monument Valley is a mobile game and so it has the obvious control method of the touchscreen and it is also a relatively simple method. I don't normally play mobile games but I know a lot of people think that they have matured a lot (and you can, of course, now play ports of some older blockbuster titles such as GTA and R-Type) so I was happy to give it a go. But only after quite a lot of faff to get it installed on my mobile which required quite a lot of retries.

The art style is simple and clean and you are presented with a path to a goal which you must walk to - simply with a tap to where on the path you want to go. It is clear, later on, that the wayfinding goes beyond just straight lines so you can click the final destination that you want after clearing/making the path. The path is made by moving levers (using the touchscreen directly) and/or tripping switches with your character. Most of the puzzles, as they are, involve moving levers and platforms so that using the screen view, it looks like there is a clear path.

The art direction, as you can see, is nice and clear - with a story book feel and like a coloured version of Echochrome. It is apparently inspired my Escher and Japanese woodprints. The sounds are stark and there is an ambient soundscape which reminded me a lot of Fez as there is a slight background sound and the levers and switches result in big movements of large stone platforms and this sound is similar. Also, level completions and level select has a similar ambient soundscape.

The game itself probably took me a couple of hours to complete over 10 levels and the puzzles do get a little more involved over that time. The main issue is that they never get particularly tricky and there are not really enough variations or opportunities to be wrong. As a result, you never feel right. It is not the kind of game that allows you to solve levels in different ways, it is quite prescriptive and so it felt, throughout, like a marginally interactive story. The controls made me feel a little detached as the tap to walk mechanic just means that you don't have to do much, solve the puzzles until you have a path and then press the final door. This is later broken down into multiscreen levels but I never felt that the levels were taxing and felt uninvolved in the whole thing. Later, you do have some "crow" like enemies but even they do not appear to do much other than provide annoying cawing.

Overall, the style and idea of the game is quite good but it feels quite a lot like a prototype rather than a full game and has the sense of the training section of a more full game. There are more levels that can be purchased (and I have not done so - it didn't grab me sufficiently) and so it may have a lot more scope but it is unlikely that I will ever find out. Unfortunately, whilst playing it, I thought mainly of the unfulfilled potential of this game and that I much preferred the Echochrome method of being "clever". That, as a game, had a little more variety and was not hampered by the control method which therefore allowed you to get things a little wrong with having so much more freedom. That would be hugely frustrating on a touchscreen mobile game, but that is still how I would judge the game experiences.

Now, I cannot be sure that this is not how mobile games work, simple and always with a sense of progress - this is quite a regular feature of games generally but it felt like a time waster. Maybe that is all it was. Maybe that is all these things are ever meant to be.

I played Monument Valley on Android (shop link) and it is available on other platforms which you can see here: (Main developer page)