Visual ingenuity and wit: Monument Valley 3 reviewed

The original Monument Valley was a handheld puzzle game of beautiful design and high originality. Why it was called that I have no idea: the title suggests a desert landscape of red dust and sand-scoured buttes, but the playspace was a series of architectural arabesques hanging in space, around which the player navigated a mournful little stick princess.

It made wonderfully clever use of isometric perspective: knobs and handles allowed you to rotate the playspace and slide structures together or apart. As you fiddled with the architecture, Escher-like perspectival tricks would open fresh paths or surfaces for Ida to walk on. The atmosphere was absorbing and the puzzles were great. 

This third instalment is in all the best respects more of the same, though it has a more disintegrative design, plays with organic forms more, seems to occur in a larger world. We re-encounter our old friend the totem-pole. And as in the second game, where the protagonist had a child in tow, we coax along various NPCs. Plus, here and there you’re sailing a ship. 

There’s some quasi-mystical bosh masquerading as a story. The first one was all about ‘sacred geometry’ (which makes me wish for a sequel that puts Ida in the Lovecraft universe fleeing through the sunken city of R’lyeh). This one has something to do with keeping a mystical lighthouse illuminated as floodwaters rise.

But the heart of it is the mechanics – which are puzzling but never frustrating. From time to time I laughed while playing it – which earns the game extra marks. There’s a very pure sort of visual ingenuity on display here which deserves the name of wit.