Monument Valley at 10: the story of the most meticulous puzzle game ever created

It’s been 10 years since tiny development studio ustwo games released Monument Valley, a game that presented a radically different approach to mobile gaming, created a genre and inspired independent studios and game design around the world. The studio is tucked away in a converted warehouse in South London. 

It’s a typical tech space, with a quiet ambience of concentration and creativity, filled with oversized plants and colourful shelves scattered with the detritus of modern culture, from plastic toys to stacks of board games. The company employs around 45 people, with everything brought together on this site, from level and character design to coding, sound and internal testing. 

Danny Gray, ustwo games’s Chief Creative Officer, explains how the game originally got off the ground. ‘We were a tiny team, part of ustwo’s London design agency,’ he recalls. The agency, founded by Matt Miller and John Sinclair in 2004, had started to branch out into the relatively new world of mobile gaming. Working with lead designer and game director Ken Wong, Gray and his skeleton team devised games that looked as if they came from a design agency, not a typical gaming background.

Tasked with developing a showcase for the agency as well as an intriguing game, the concept came together relatively quickly. ‘We started off with reams and reams of concept art,’ says Gray, ‘it was all very audience-led – we’d pin it up on the walls of the studio and invite comments. It was an isometric drawing of architecture that got the most attention.’ Almost straight away, this image led to a prototype of a single-screen game where you had to guide a character from ‘point A to point B.’ One key gameplay mechanism, however, arose out of a graphical glitch; one of the sliding blocks appeared to move ‘impossibly’, instantly introducing the element of optical illusion and inviting new ways to navigate the on-screen world.

As anyone who’s ever played the two Monument Valley games will know, each level is meticulously constructed. ‘From that idea to launch was took less than a year,’ says Gray, ‘Just six people made the game from beginning to end.’ The team was aiming for a modest total of 100,000 downloads, hoping to raise its profile – it was treated like a piece of marketing. The main energy went into carefully composing the levels. ‘It had to be all killer, no filler, with each level having its own core mechanism like a specific type of rotation,’ Gray explains, ‘we started with 30 levels and whittled it down to 10. We were all about polish, not size.’

The small team was so laser-focused on delivering the best game they could that the name wasn’t even considered until the very end. ‘Right before launch we were going to be interviewed by Edge magazine – the morning of that day we hadn’t picked the name.’ Monument Valley was chosen as being familiar, yet unusual, implying a sense of mystery, grandeur and travel. 

The Edge feature included a number of intriguing screenshots. ‘They got the ball rolling – people wanted to know how it played,’ says Gray. A couple of rounds of beta testing opened the game up to swathes of influential people in the design and gaming industries. ‘It helped to position the game in a more highbrow way,’ Gray says, ‘the impossible angles blew people away – it was like a form of street magic.’

Right out of the gate, Monument Valley got crucial support from Apple. ‘Google weren’t especially supportive [of the Android version] as it didn’t have any of the traditional gaming elements like in-app purchases,’ says Gray, ‘Apple saw the value straight away. They flagged up in the App store and even used it in their own marketing material.’ 

The end result had a pixel-perfect axonometric aesthetic that not only went hard on its references to Dutch master artist and printmaker Maurits Cornelis Escher, but also dug deep into classic video game design, going right back to early arcade machines and 8-bit titles. Each of the ten levels is like a piece of fine furniture, built with invisible dovetail joints and inlaid with marquetry, stuffed with secret compartments and little design flourishes. Gray cites the world of theatre and stage design, as well as graphics, as important keystones in the way the levels were constructed. ‘Ken would always talk about flower arranging, and how you frame a silhouette of a level on the screen,’ he says.

Another aspect of Monument Valley that feels ahead of its time was its calm, mindful pace, buoyed by the lavish graphics and soothing music. Everyone from Brian Eno to Steve Reich influenced the sound of the finished product. ‘Myself and Ken ended up sitting down and drafting a Spotify playlist. We ended up using a track by Chicago-based musician Obfusc for the trailer, and that set the tone,’ says Gray, ‘there were also a lot of sound tests, where we gave the game to different sound designer and asked them to comp in ideas.’ The end result, with music by Todd Baker, is a minimal, ethereal and synthetic soundscape, where ‘every level is in effect an audio-visual toy.’ 

Released ten years ago this week, Monument Valley was soon followed by an expansion, Forgotten Shores, which added in some of the omitted levels. ‘It was basically a full game again, which was a bad business decision, but gave it a huge spike in popularity,’ says Gray. Awards followed, including recognition from BAFTA, Apple and D&AD, and it became a pop cultural staple, a rare crossover from the gaming world. ‘It was featured in Netflix’s House of Cards as a key plot device – this gave us a whole new audience,’ Gray recalls.

Monument Valley 2 was released in 2017 and to date the series has exceeded 160 million installs. Even though it’s been well over six years, Monument Valley 3 is now in an advanced stage of production. ‘It takes a long time for that well of creativity to be replenished,’ Gray admits, ‘it’s not the kind of game you can just do with 100 similar-looking levels.’ These days, ustwo games is a totally separate company to the Shoreditch-based design agency. A new development team is also bringing a new perspective. ‘We’re taking the original concept in surprising and different ways,’ says Gray, ‘I always thought MV1 was quite pure and MV2 was very narrative driven. MV3 will have the best of both worlds.’

Secrecy is tight around the new title for now, with suggestions that it’ll be something that can be replayed, rather than the very linear models of the first two games. Dynamic lighting is also on the cards, thanks largely to increases in the computing power of our mobile devices. As mentioned, Monument Valley simultaneously harked back to early computer graphics and fine art, yet it also introduced a clean, minimalist style that has proved incredibly influential, especially in the indie gaming sphere.

For Gray and the rest of the team at ustwo, the game was the making of the studio, as well as a rare example of pure creativity and innovation receiving due commercial reward. ‘These days there’s less diversity and innovation [in gaming],’ he muses, ‘Something can’t just make a bit of money, it has to make all the money. It’s the antithesis of creativity. We have to allow ourselves to work on the things that exist in the gaps of the algorithm. Monument Valley was a bet on ourselves, one that came back 100-hold. Hopefully Monument Valley 3 will hark back to a time when we could take these kinds of risks and be innovative.’

Monument Valley 1 and 2 are available on the Apple App Store and Google Play, as well as on Steam. The series is also coming to Netflix gaming later this year.

For more information about the 10th anniversary, visit ustwo games, ustwogames.co.uk, @ustwogames