There’s something nostalgic about going back to Monument Valley. Ustwo’s indie hit debuted on mobile in 2014 and helped establish (at least for a mainstream audience) that the mobile space could include the artistry of the wider indie games scene with thoughtful, immaculately presented, perspective-bending puzzlers alongside all the clickers and tappers and match-threes. The striking presentation and Escher-style designs put it squarely in the ‘games as art’ category. And though short, it was sweet enough to linger long after you’d finished. I remember having a wonderful time with it on iOS.
Two sequels eventually came, and now they’re all on PC and consoles. 1 and 2, available separately or as a bundle, are joined by Monument Valley III, previously a Netflix Games exclusive since its December ’24 mobile launch. These console versions expand the canvas to 16:9 and adapt the controls for a gamepad. And it works, just. It’s a shame, though, to see the impeccable presentation let down a little by some odd choices and a glitch or two at launch.
For Monument Valley newbies, you’re presented with discreet screens featuring surreal architecture floating in a dreamy landscape and tasked with guiding your character — in this case, Noor — around the blocky structures to buttons, doorways, and eventually the exit. You don’t control Noor directly; rather, you tap — or in this case scooch your cursor along the path and click (more on this later) — where you want her to walk, after which she’ll make her way there, if the route is clear.
Movable platforms, dials, and other interactable elements enable you to change the twisting terrain in a perspective-breaking fashion which makes sense from an isometric viewpoint, but couldn’t exist in real 3D space. For instance, a platform jutting out low down on one tower might form a bridge to the top of a neighbouring structure with a simple 90-degree twist – things like that.
As you progress, the structures and mechanics get infinitely more interesting as platforms turn in on themselves and expectations invert in surprising ways which are best discovered on your own — especially for a short game like this — but the basic goal is always the same: create a clear pathway for your character and navigate to the next objective.
As with the previous games, there’s a gentle narrative of self-discovery, here centred around sailing and restoring a lighthouse in a small ocean hub. It touches on familiar themes: relationships, responsibility, the friends we make and lose, recovery when all hope seems lost, and bringing colour back to a desolate world.
It’s beautifully presented and animated, and touching in its way, although ‘familiar’ is the word. It’s so delicately and deftly presented — with an injection of character that elevates it beyond just beautifully shaded shapes and illusory puzzle play — that you can’t help but go with it. But if you’ve been playing anything outside mainstream blockbusters for the last decade, only the puzzles will surprise you.
That and the lack of touchscreen controls, perhaps. Instead, you use a fairly subtle circular cursor to select where you want Noor to go. Holding ‘A’ on an interactable element makes it movable with a push or prod of the stick. This black dot ‘adheres’ to any surface you can walk on (rather than floating freely across the screen), and while it’s not inelegant, it’s also not flawless.
Various times, I was prodding the stick to shift a single space to a neighbouring block, but then overshot and found myself readjusting for several seconds. You can change the sensitivity in the options, but after a touchscreen’s intuitiveness, any faff whatsoever feels jarring.
These games have always been a case of quality over quantity, and including all my note-taking and experimentation, I spent no more than two hours getting through the 11 chapters currently in the game. It was supposed to have the full Garden of Life DLC included at launch, although that’s now coming as part of a larger update sometime later in 2025. You’re investing in an incomplete package at launch, then, although it could do with another round of tweaks and polish to get that quality up to the standards you expect from Ustwo.
Nothing is game-breaking or enough to distract you from the brilliance of the base game – there are just some rough edges and glitches which stick out (I played Ver. 1. 218712). My boat jittered a bit as the eyeball on the sail blinked. Text flashed up for a split second before the ‘unravel’ animation began. Credits appeared garbled as department and position titles couldn’t be found to display correctly above the names.
The game itself runs fine, with performance taxing the Switch a little in the open-ocean segment, although its effect is negligible on a game as sedate as this one. Testing on Switch 2, these hiccups are predictably smoothed over. I’m confident the little ‘glitch’ issues will be addressed in due course, but juxtaposing them with the otherwise stellar presentation, it’s just noticeable.
Visually, MV3 is a festival of colour with some surprising and welcome variation between chapters, and it all looks pleasantly crisp on Switch – and predictably lovely on the OLED Model. The orchestral audio is a treat, too, gently enhancing the mood of the tranquil pastel stone architecture, the ominous polygonal waves, and the more surreal places the story takes you.
It all comes together to make an accessible puzzler of real depth and beauty, but one that doesn’t quite reach its potential on a platform that offers the best of all worlds. According to the developers, after testing the functionality and finding that it led to frustration, there are no plans at this time to implement touchscreen controls on Switch. I get that the added screen real estate might make touch input less precise than on mobile, but with the cursor also lacking precision, I wonder if it would be worse.
Maybe adding pinch-to-zoom creates other problems, but you would (or at least I did) expect those to be solved if you’re putting out Monument Valley on this platform. It feels like a fundamental oversight that a game originally developed on a touchscreen device doesn’t include that input on Switch. Likewise, the gyro in the Joy-Con and Pro Controllers could be used for pointer controls (see World of Goo 2). Given the premium you pay on Switch over the mobile apps, you might expect this option to be present, too.
The team is apparently open to feedback, so it’s not impossible that touch input could be added in the future. Its absence isn’t a dealbreaker, and this remains a wonderful piece of work. It does, however, make for a confounding first impression which doesn’t have the time to completely wear off over the game’s short runtime.
Source link