Critical Play: Monument Valley

Puzzle Mechanics

The mechanics of Monument Valley truly define the game experience. At the start of the game, you are given only two possible actions as a player: 1) tap a place on the road for Ida to walk to and 2) hold and turn puzzle levers. With these two actions, you are set loose in a world that is simultaneously a maze and a toy. You must reach the final platform of the world to clear each level, manipulating the architecture as you go to create your own passage.

The use of only two mechanics mirrors the simplicity of the experience itself; the game has a clean, minimalistic design, and the gameplay is uncomplicated and refreshing. Solving each puzzle feels like an act of therapy—you mold the world Ida is walking through to clear her path, dodging sketchy looking predator birds along the way, and bending physics and geometry to yield almost magical results. It’s just as fun to manipulate the architecture of the world as it is to crack the puzzle itself. As you figure out new ways to interact with the world (via those crafty levers), those skills then become essential to solving future levels, which get more loopy in structure and are laden with more obstacles.

Given the puzzles are fun in and of themselves, you can easily forget why Ida is even in this world or what she’s trying to accomplish. For the brief moments when it does cross your mind though, there is a blue motherly ghost who appears now and again to offer snippets of reasoning and story development. I did not play far enough to figure out what Ida is up to walking around these mazes, but I was having too much fun to mind.