TOArchitectural surrealism is the signature of Monument Valley. The stark and beautiful structures morph and rotate with the player’s touch, creating new paths and staircases for their minimalist characters to traverse. Doors can lead anywhere. Switches cause columns to rise from the ground, a change in perspective can reveal a cache of hidden paths. Since 2014, these games have been must-haves for smartphones, one of the best and most elegant examples of satisfying touchscreen puzzles. But the third in the series, released last week, is a little different.
The Moroccan-inspired architecture that made the game famous is still present, but this time your geometric character, Noor, also walks alongside flowers and twisting vines. She sails in a small boat. Lost in bright yellow wheat fields. And there are many more people around her: she is an apprentice lighthouse keeper, in charge of the well-being of her community, which, after some scenes in the game, is devastated by a flood. In some scenes she is accompanied by someone else, or there is someone there to rescue her. It’s a game about buildings, but also a game about rebuilding together.
Monument Valley is now a Netflix game (all three entries are free to download for subscribers to the service) and is still being manufactured at Ustwo Games, a small studio in London. Some of the creators of the first game are still around, but as you would expect after 10 years, the staff has evolved. Monument Valley 3 director Jennifer Estaris joined the company in 2020. She is a climate activist, as well as an experienced game designer, and is heavily involved with the UN. Playing for the planet Initiative: An additional chapter was created for Monument Valley 2, The Lost Forest, as part of its Green Game Jam. These sensibilities, shared by everyone I spoke to at Ustwo Games, have clearly had an influence on the game.
“I think the green push is important and I also believe in systems change and how we could represent that in a game,” Estaris tells me. “That was one of my main ideas for Monument Valley 3: how do we change what it means to be part of a community, to be sustainable and resilient in a way that is a hopeful future? (We were) thinking about nature-based solutions, but also how we can live more in harmony with nature to provide the solutions we need.”
The resulting game is a quietly satisfying and deeply aesthetic puzzle game that is also, on one level, about climate migration. With its more natural forms, it breaks some of the rules of Monument Valley, mixing and matching styles and ideas more freely. Some scenes emerge from the lighthouse’s stained glass windows. One unfolds beautifully on sheets of colored paper. Others have you experiment with portals or Möbius shapes. The plants grow and intertwine through the architectural geometry.
“I feel like we were looking at Monument Valley, with its big monuments and mysterious, distant characters, and thinking, ‘Can we do this differently?'” says lead designer Emily Brown. “One of the first sketches (by lead artist Lili Ibrahim) was of a small town on the side of a hill and all the buildings were much smaller. I still had illusions and it was still a puzzle, but… it was different. “We were asking for something different from this world.”
Fittingly, one of Brown’s first experiences with gaming involved things that weren’t what they seemed. Growing up between the UK and Oman, his family had an off-brand Nintendo Famicom that came with a strangely distorted version of Mario: half the screen showed the game as it was supposed to be, but on the other half, nothing. was. real. You would see a tunnel, but when you got there it would turn out to be a hole. “It was a different version of the game with that presumption that what you see is not what you’re going to get,” he laughs.
Part of the power of Monument Valley has been that is Minimalist and austere: it leaves you space for your thoughts. People bring their own feelings and stories. The visual style remains in the mind, but so does the feeling of space. Adding a little more message to the game risks taking up some of the space that was previously intentionally left blank, but as Estaris says, it was impossible for the team. No to contribute something of themselves. Brown adds: “I hope people can see that there is a path we can take together. And that things will be better if we do things that way. An ambitious hope for a very abstract game.”
Interestingly, the concept of this game was first devised in 2021, amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. With its themes of community, togetherness, and disaster recovery, I wonder if it’s the first in a wave of games conceived during that time that will convey messages of connection and hope.
“When we started making this game, we were excited by the idea of hopeful punk,” Estaris says. “Having hope should not be rebellious. More and more games are I’m hopeful now, but I’d love for people to feel like there’s more to it than doom and gloom: that we can get through it. But we have to do it together.”