The Monument Valley series quickly managed to become a true emblem of the world of independent video games, managing to create its own specific identity, which made it particularly recognizable and unique. The journey, which began 10 years ago with the launch of the first chapter of the series, now reaches a new stage, where many things have undergone an interesting turn compared to the beginning.
The franchise has in fact passed into the hands of the multinational streaming company Netflix which, in recent days, has released Monument Valley 3 directly on its mobile app, making it freely accessible to all those who are subscribers to the well-known service. We played the title in this mode, and we are going to talk about it in more detail in our review.
A journey with delicate colours
The structure and gameplay of Monument Valley 3 does not present huge differences compared to what we have learned about with the previous chapters of the series. In short: “team that wins, you don’t change”, as they say. We therefore find ourselves guiding our protagonists (yes, this time too there are two) in a series of idyllic scenarios characterized by bright colors and simple, minimal, but never banal, shapes.
The title offers, as in the case of the first chapter of the series, 10 chapters: a loot destined to increase in terms of quantity, as revealed by the developers, on the occasion of various updates arriving over the next few weeks. Basically, it is a title that offers the player a low level of challenge, an equally low amount of time (we are about an hour into the game, for those who want to take it easy and observe settings and stages with the desire to immerse themselves in them ) and a large dose of graphically and artistically satisfying elements.
One factor where we notice a desire to evolve, for the title, compared to previous chapters is certainly the artistic direction: let’s be clear, Monument Valley has always been synonymous with elegant minimalism, but never as in this chapter do we perceive great attention from the developers in the choice of colours, lights and, above all, in the detail that matches the simplicity of the shapes of what surrounds the protagonists.
A choice, this, which translates into giving Monument Valley 3 much greater importance to the visual aspect than to the playful one, resulting in a title that is absolutely beautiful to look at and created precisely for the purpose of being seen, rather than being played. As previously mentioned, in fact, the gameplay of the title is extremely simple and not very challenging, but absolutely functional and well managed on the reference platform, with touch controls that are intuitive and well motivated in their insertion and structure.
In conclusion, we can consider Monument Valley a coherent step in the series’ journey: an extremely beautiful package to look at on mobile that puts the gaming experience on a lower level than the visual and emotional impact. A project therefore capable of easily meeting the needs of those who are not used to playing video games: a particularly sensible approach given that the title is currently only available to Netflix subscribers, who certainly do not subscribe to take advantage of the mobile game library .
