PixlBit

Every so often, I am lucky enough to play a game so delightful, so perfectly engineered for its platform, and so inspiring that I have to take a step back, stunned.  While other arts such as literature and painting seem long in the tooth these days, clutching to cynicism and nihilism like a terminal patient clinging to the sheets in his bed, great games seem imbued with a sort of impossible optimism and generosity towards the human condition.  Monument Valley, a game about redemption through sacred geometry, is one of those games. 

It’s easy to forget that our lives are built around amazing feats of engineering and mathematics, and in earlier times these disciplines were treated with a sort of pious awe, while these days we consider them second rate talents, or at best, “job skills”.  Most of us sit in math class agonizing over how we can escape equations, rather than how we can find redemption through them, but in certain pockets of civilization the ancient reverence lives on.  Not all of us were made to enjoy math, though most of us were made to enjoy the fruits of it. 

Monument Valley is a puzzle game composed of tricks of geometry rather than opaque formulas, but math is math.  Inspired by the works of M.C. Escher and other master illusionists, the game is a treat of worlds that could never exist in our universe outside of a dream or an illustration – until now, where they exist in a video game. 

Perfectly designed for the often inspiring but also often maligned gaming medium of the tablet, the game perhaps could also work on a console or a PC, but it is effortless with a touch screen, and in fact sometimes the game requires you to spin the screen entirely around as you look for new perspectives in the puzzles – something that’s hard to do with a TV or computer monitor.  Turning the iPad around, flipping the world upside down and sideways, is key to solving the myriad of puzzles.  Our eyes and our logic can deceive us, and sometimes we need to twist and turn until we see the answer. 

The premise of the game is simple: Navigate a young princess through obstacles on ten different levels, each larger and more geometrically diabolical than the last.  While the princess is mostly limited to pressing buttons, you (the player) have more control, as you can maneuver the levels using levers and blocks to rearrange things and afford the princess access to areas that she would not be able to reach without your help.  By manipulating the levels – spinning them, lifting them, twirling them –and guiding the princess around, you will not only beat the game, but also offer solace to the ancient people who built these puzzles – or monuments – in the first place. 

This slight but sincere mythology, which infuses the game with a sort of human light the way the abstract story of Journey did, is both mysterious and austere.  While it is simple almost to the point of formlessness, it also hints at a greater story that doesn’t need telling – in Monument Valley, only the essential remains. 

The puzzles start of easy, and the player might start thinking he or she is quite clever as they quickly navigate the first few levels.  But soon enough, the puzzles get pretty difficult, and ultimately will have one thinking hard and spinning the tablet around almost endlessly.  The imaginary geometry is never too tough to grasp, though, and by bending what we take for granted about reality, the player will happily solve all the puzzles in the game. 

The game is a delight.  Whether you’re rotating the world upside down to connect stairs that couldn’t possibly be connected, or tricking a grumpy crow into pressing a button, or even riding a kindly anthropomorphic totem, the game is sheer fun.  While short (I completed it in two hours), Monument Valley is a monument in and of itself, and it not only reminds me of the amazing power of video games, but of the great goodness of life itself.