‘People should feel there’s more than doom and gloom’: Monument Valley 3’s environmentalist hope-punk

Architectural surrealism is Monument Valley’s signature. Austere, beautiful structures transform and rotate at the player’s touch, creating new paths and staircases for its minimalist characters to traverse. Doorways can lead anywhere. Switches cause columns to rise out of the ground, a perspective shift can reveal a cache of hidden pathways. Since 2014 these games have been smartphone must-plays, one of the best and most elegant examples of satisfying touch-screen puzzlers. But the third in the series, released last week, is a little different.

The Moroccan-inspired architecture that made the game famous is still present, but this time your geometric character Noor walks alongside blooming flowers and twisting vines, too. She sails a small boat. She gets lost in fields of bright yellow wheat. And there are many more people around her: she is a lighthouse-keeper’s apprentice, charged with the welfare of her community – which, a few scenes into the game, is ravaged by a flood. In some scenes she is accompanied by someone else, or there is someone there to rescue. It is a game about buildings still, but also a game about rebuilding, together.

Monument Valley is a Netflix game now – all three entries are free to download for the service’s subscribers – and it is still made at Ustwo Games, a small studio in London. Some of the creators of the first game are still present, but as you would expect after 10 years, the staff has evolved. Monument Valley 3’s director Jennifer Estaris joined the company in 2020. She is a climate activist as well as an experienced game designer, and is heavily involved with the UN’s Playing for the Planet initiative: an extra chapter for Monument Valley 2, The Lost Forest, was created as part of its Green Game Jam. These sensibilities – shared by everyone I spoke to at Ustwo Games – have had a clear influence on the game.

“I think green nudging is important, and I also believe in systems change and how we might portray that in a game,” Estaris tells me. “That was one of my main ideas for Monument Valley 3: how do we change what it means to be part of a community, to be sustainable and resilient in a way that is a hopeful future? [We were] thinking about nature-based solutions, but also about how we can live more in harmony with nature in order to provide the solutions that we need.”

The resulting game is a calmly satisfying and profoundly aesthetically pleasing puzzle game that’s also, on one level, about climate migration. With its more natural forms and shapes, it breaks some of the rules of Monument Valley, mixing and matching styles and ideas more freely. Some scenes emerge from stained-glass windows in the lighthouse. One unfolds beautifully on coloured pieces of paper. Others have you experimenting with portals, or Möbius forms. Plants grow and intertwine through the architectural geometry.

“I feel like we looked at Monument Valley, with its big tall monuments and mysterious, aloof characters, and thought: ‘Can we do this differently?’” says lead designer Emily Brown. “One of [lead artist Lili Ibrahim’s] earliest sketches was of a little village on a hillside and all the buildings were much smaller. It still had illusions, and it was still a puzzle, but … it was different. We were asking something different of this world.”

Appropriately, one of Brown’s very first experiences with games involved things that were not as they seemed. Growing up between the UK and Oman, her family had some off-brand Nintendo Famicom that came with a strangely distorted version of Mario: one half of the screen showed the game as it was supposed to be, but on the other half, nothing was real. You would see a tunnel, but when you got there it would turn out to be a hole. “It was a different version of the game with this conceit of, what you see is not what you’re going to get,” she laughs.

Part of the power of Monument Valley has been that it is minimalist and austere – it leaves you space for your thoughts. People bring their own feelings and stories to it. The visual style sticks in the mind, but so does that sense of space. Adding a little more of a message to the game risks occupying some of the space that was previously left intentionally blank – but as Estaris says, it was impossible for the team not to bring some of themselves to it. Brown adds: “I hope that people can see there’s a journey we can take together. And that things will be better if we do things that way. An ambitious hope for a very abstract game.”

It is interesting that the concept for this game was first devised in 2021, in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. With its themes of community, togetherness and recovery from disaster, I wonder if it is the first of a wave of games conceived during that time that will carry messages of connection and hope.

“When we first started making this game we were excited by the idea of hope-punk,” says Estaris. “It shouldn’t be rebellious to be hopeful. More and more games are hopeful now, but I would love for people to feel that there’s more than doom and gloom: that we can overcome. But we have to do it together.”