This Might Be the Most Beautiful iPad Game of 2014
A really good videogame should transport you to another place. Most of the time, these games are loud and fast-moving, with action so consuming that you forget about the world around you. But with Monument Valley, a new game from design firm Ustwo slated to be released early next year, you’ll get something just as engrossing, yet totally different.
Fire up the iPad-only game, and you’ll suddenly find yourself inside a colorful M.C. Escher drawing brought to life. The isometric worlds of Monument Valley are filled with stairs that lead to nowhere, trick doors and seemingly dead-end paths. The levels, with their blocks of colors, bold shapes and strong compositions are as mystifying as they are beautiful.
“Early on in the project someone said it would be great if every frame of the game was so beautiful you’d want to hang it on your wall as a piece of art,” says Ken Wong, artist and designer of the game. “That became our ambitious goal.” Wong and company know the value of a gorgeously rendered game world: their last hit title, Whale Trail, took players to a cheerful realm of sparkling stars and flying cetaceans.
But the visual design of Monument Valley isn’t just decoration; it’s integral to the game’s puzzle-like gameplay, too. Each level looks different from the next, but the goal remains the same: Guide Ida, your curious little avatar, through architectural labyrinths to finish the level. Along the way she encounters all sorts of obstacles, like missing walkways and marching Crow People who obstruct her path. More than once you’ll find yourself asking: Is that stairway really a dead end? And the answer is, probably not. Monument Valley is full of optical illusions that test your spatial reasoning. But it’s your job to figure out what’s real, what’s fake and how you can bridge the gap between those two states using the visual cues from the game.
The puzzles are satisfying mentally and aesthetically, too.
“People have an innate sense of geometry, patterns and space,” says Wong. “We find cubic forms and staircases and interlocking tiles beautiful. There’s also something satisfying and even a bit mystical about shapes lining up perfectly.” So when Ida trips a trigger that enables a pathway to rotate 180 degrees and bridge a gap, it’s not just satisfying from a “hey, I won” perspective. It’s satisfying mentally and aesthetically, too. In order to beat the levels, Ida has to defy practical laws of physics. Gravity, balance, ordinary perspective don’t exist in Monument Valley. One minute she’s walking upright along a path, and the next she’s scaling up the side of a wall. “We started envisioning a world with lots of neat ‘impossible’ tricks for the player to discover,” Wong explains.
This makes the gameplay deceptively simple. Monument Valley is not a fast-moving game. Ida strolls along at a leisurely pace, glancing around at her beautiful surroundings as she climbs up ladders and walks through mysterious doors. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. It took me longer than I care to admit to get through the prelude, an introductory world where you guide Ida up a set of stairs via a series of simple (in retrospect) movements in order to start the game in earnest. It takes a bit of trial and error before you begin to understand the visual cues Ustwo has planted in the puzzles—the blocks of color, the buttons, the levers that activate the knobs and wheels that allow you to progress. This was on purpose.
ong says that while the design was meant to present players with thought-provoking stimulus, they left the rules and gameplay vague so each player could craft his or her own experience. “ I like to think that video games can be a bit more open to interpretation, like music,” he says. “It was always important to us for players to be able to figure out what to do on their own, with little or no instruction from the game. Like a Mario game, our aim is to gradually teach a vocabulary of interactive elements during the early stages of the game.”
He points to the use of color. Early on in the game development process, they tried to use bright colors to signify interactive elements in the game, like Mirror’s Edge. “This proved troublesome on later levels where we used color more just for decoration,” he explains. “We had to instead teach players in a very subtle way to look for clues in shape and contrast.”
If Whale Trail’s lush visuals were a nice bit of decoration, with Monument Valley, they’re the foundation of the experience. “We hope players will stay engaged for the same reasons they might enjoy a walk through a museum or an art gallery,” Wong explains. “We know there are mobile gamers out there looking for this kind of thoughtful, aesthetic experience.”
