Monument Valley Review: Journey Meets M.C. Escher

Monument Valley is a beautiful game.

The mobile gaming industry has pretty much gained the universal destain of the mainstream video game culture. Where once the mobile gaming sector showed great promise with fun and fresh games like Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja, now is almost completely consumed by greedy exploitative “free to play” games like Dungeon Keeper and Final Fantasy: All the Bravest. Games whose sole goal is to psychologically manipulate the player into giving them as much money as possible with as little actual game to play as possible. It’s so bad now that freaking South Park devoted an episode making fun of it. However, in spite of all the crap in the mobile gaming market it is still possible to find gold. Monument Valley is one of those pieces of gold.

The mysterious crow people often act as obstacles.

Monument Valley is a simple, yet deviously brilliant little game that tells the story of a silent princess named Ida as she travels across the ruins of a long forgotten civilization. Aside from the text introductions of each of the ten chapters and the dialogue of a mysterious ghost character the story never spills the beans on what exactly is going on leaving much of the story up to interpretation. That is perfectly fine with me as I feel that more vague stories help the player feel more connected with the world as they are not being told what to think or what to feel and are aloud to create their own little stories.

Well...that's a little strange.

Anyway, the goal of the game is to get to the end of each of the levels and revive each monument you explore. Sounds simple enough and for the first few levels it is, but the thing that Monument Valley does brilliantly is slowly introduce it’s non-Euclidean puzzle designs in a way that does not overwhelm first time players. Later levels can get extremely mind bending with some very complex M.C. Escher inspired levels, but the answer is never more than a few taps of the screen away and will leave you feeling very satisfied when you get the solution. All in all, Monument Valley is a game best experienced as blind as possible and all you have to know is that you are in for a mind bending treat.

How will Ida reach the top?

My only real problems with the game is that it’s a little too short barely clocking in at an hour and the really meaty puzzles are only really found in the expansion Forgotten Shores, but frankly the game is very cheap and so is the expansion and quite frankly six bucks(counting Forgotten Shores) is a fair price for a high quality game, which is much less than so called “free to play” games would have you pay in the long run. Much less. Monument Valley is available on the iTunes, Android, and Amazon app store and can be played on most mobile devices.