Monument Valley 3 review - poise, beauty and just a little sense of progression

UsTwo's slightly airless prettiness benefits from a few new ideas.

I've always found the Monument Valley games slightly frustrating, because they're beautiful, creative things that don't seem to have that much room for the player. They're quietly misleading in this regard. With their fixed viewpoints, Persian influence and love of Escher-like geometry, they look like perfect brain-teasy puzzle games. In reality they're more akin to the likes of Uncharted than they are something along the lines of Echochrome or Crush. The plan is all laid out for you and you can't really deviate from it. Hit your marks, know your place, and save your sense of wonder for all the visual tricks the developers are playing on you.

This in part came down to the design, which has offered two main kinds of puzzles in the past. There was one in which you would use trick perspectives to create impossible paths - if two planes looked like they lined up in this world, you could treat them as if they actually did. Then there was another in which you'd interact with a switch or a sliding doodad or a twisty thing and the world would transform around you. The little minarets and towertops the game played out on would curl up, split apart, invert themselves and you'd be left with new doodads to mess around with.

This stuff was unfailingly elegant and beautiful to watch, but in a game about getting from A to B on each screen, it meant you were at the mercy of how energetic the designers were feeling. You couldn't really read the landscape and plot a path across it because you didn't know what the landscape was capable of doing at any single point. You were along for the ride, and that feels sub-optimal in a game like this, even if it's a very pretty ride.

That's why I found the first two Monument Valleys frustrating. The third one strikes me as being frustrating because it has all the problems of the first two, until it suddenly doesn't anymore. You get a couple of levels where new ideas come in and they're as playful and expressive and fun to tinker with as you could hope. And then the game's over - for now. It concludes just as it feels like it's getting started.

We'll get to that last point in a bit. But for the majority of the campaign, Monument Valley 3 continues with the series' love of lightly interactive beauty. There are a handful of changes even here, however. There's a new yearning for open spaces, with waves to gad over in a boat and one sequence in which you race through a corn field. But the game doesn't really have many ideas for what to do with these open spaces, so you're generally just moving from one chunk of puzzle territory to the next.

Image credit: UsTwo Games

Equally, there's a new emphasis on working with other characters - using them to weight switches and trigger events and the like. The fable-like story makes lunges at emotion as these characters are split up and reunited, but as ever it's all too corporately fable-like. It feels like a really good Waitrose ad, so I suspect genuine emotion is a little bit of a reach here.

Moving characters about results in a mid-game sequence in which Monument Valley 3 strives for what feels like a real puzzle, but it stumbles, and for a weird reason. This is a game that's so poised in its presentation, so adept at leading you by the nose, but when you have to move a few other people about, and work within the parameters of what they're able to do in each situation, it gets confused. The game isn't clear enough at explaining the way it works and what each part will and won't do, so you have to end up just muddling through as ever.

I sound very down on this game, and I apologise. At each stage it's astonishingly beautiful, offering poised, perfectly balanced images and landscapes that you yearn to explore if the game would let you. But the rigours of how it unfolds are too tight. It doesn't want to be ugly, or let you find your own solution, even if it's a bodged solution. It has all these great animations in store for you and it wants you to see them, as towers sink into the sea, palace walls crack open and light spills down from the sky. It's beautiful, but as a whole, it can also feel a bit airless, a bit dead.

Change does come gradually. Gently at first, with an early level that explodes the game's approach to colour but is a little too fiddly, and a later level sees you navigating two landscapes locked in an unusual relationship with one another. Then we get the introduction of more organic elements, and finally a brilliant idea that I won't spoil but which lets you change the plane you're on in an incredibly satisfying manner.

Image credit: UsTwo Games

It's properly lovely. For three or so levels, Monument Valley 3 offers a gorgeous world that you can genuinely tinker with. A world you can get stuck in, until the solution tumbles into your brain and - oh yes, it was all so simple! These are levels where you can make mistakes and double back on yourself, and when you finally get from A to B, you feel like you earned it, and like you could have worked a lot of it out from the start. It's genuinely wonderful to see a beautiful thing finally blossoming into an interesting game.

I just wish a bit more of the campaign had been like this. I wish developer Ustwo had stumbled on great new ideas sooner and spent a little less time in the prison of excellent taste that this series has always struggled to escape from. But that's the final thing. This isn't the end. After ten campaign missions, you get a screen telling you that there's more to come, that the game will be evolving over the coming months.

The screen that tells you this is beautiful, of course - the fonts, the line weights, the way the illustrative frame comes together. But it also gives me a bit of genuine hope. There are moments here where at least the series itself seems to be going somewhere new. I just wish it would get here a little sooner.

A copy of Monument Valley 3 was provided for review by publisher Netflix.