Monument Valley

[psocoptera]

I've had "write a review of Monument Valley" on my to-do list since July, which is a little ridiculous - whatever I wanted to say about it isn't getting any more fresh or coherent by waiting. It's only going to keep getting worse, though, so. Monument Valley.

I play almost no "video games", as they are usually thought of - I've always been fond of things in the Tetris/Gunshy/Arkanoid/Columns/Snood/BreakThru/Tesserae/Bejeweled/Minesweeper/BitBubbles family (man, I don't even want to know how many hours of my life is represented in that string there), and card/board games in their app versions (Klondike and Spider, more recently Dominion and Ticket to Ride and now Splendor), but almost nothing in the entire many genres of "there is something on the screen that is You and you are moving it around to Do Things". Crystal Quest, I guess, is the closest thing to that? Oh, or Spectre, the tank game, that definitely counts, although I was never very good at that. (Or Beyond Dark Castle, although I was *really* never any good at that.) Anyways, I've been pretty baffled by more modern games of this ilk that I've tried... someone showed me the Miraculous Ladybug game (probably Michelle?) and despite trying multiple times I wasn't able to get through the tutorial, or even really understand what I was supposed to be doing or how it was possible to do it. (I mean, I guess I get it, it just seems like you'd have to have inhumanly fast reaction times?? Or, really, I assume, people who play a lot of video games develop that kind of reaction time and those of us who don't, don't?)

Anyways, Monument Valley was a video game I could actually play, because there is a figure you're navigating around, but no time component, except for a couple of levels where you need to move something while something else is in the right part of a repetitive motion. But even then if you miss you can just try again. It's also visually *stunning* and such a clever concept, and, I don't know, I was really struck by how much narrative it felt like it had, how, like, emotionally involving it was, how much feeling and drama the different environments conveyed, how strongly I reacted to various developments, for something so nominally simple. (Trying to stay completely spoiler-free here.) Plus some satisfying puzzles. Someday when I feel like I need something that absorbing again I'm going to buy the sequel.

(Monument Valley, Forgotten Shores, and Ida's Dream were all free for me in some Amazon promotion, but I think they're definitely worth buying, which is weird for me... I've almost never bought a computer game myself, just played free games or things that other people have bought (or, uh, acquired, I seem to recall my dad just sort of coming home with interesting floppies sometimes. (In my head, he brought Tetris home from a Russian cruise, although I'm not sure that's actually right. But I'm pretty sure "we're at sea so obviously we're all going to pirate anything remotely entertaining from each other" came into this somewhere.)) But I guess I've bought a bunch of TTR boards, so this is something I do now, thirty years into my computer-gaming life? (Radical Castle, in something like 1986 or '87. And then Crystal Quest and Cairo Shootout and Stunt Copter and GunShy. Man I miss the Mac SE. Also *man* I'm apparently full of nostalgia today. Welp. I guess it's better than yelling at the clouds.))

Comments

[ruthling]

I saw that somewhere and knew, correctly, that G would love it. I enjoyed the bits i watched him play but my patience for puzzles like that is super limited and I would not have enjoyed the whole game.