The most elegant yet not free game
Would video games benefit from being shorter ? That’s the question on the minds of the eight members of London-based studio Ustwo in 2013. Some are approaching their thirties, others have already passed it; their professional agendas and personal lives are full. It is therefore difficult to go through with adventures that sometimes last several dozen hours.
What if they invented a short game that everyone could finish ? This would be in line with their project to design an inspiring and creative smartphone game: “We thought it would avoid repeating ourselves or stretching concepts. We would be respectful of the player’s time,” says English producer Danny Gray. “All we wanted to do was take the player to a really beautiful place.”
The beautiful place in question is called Monument Valley. The player explores it with Ida, a princess dressed all in white. He takes her through ancient and magical buildings. Wich are actually puzzles. By touching the screen with the tip of your finger, you have to move walls, rotate bridges, turn cranks or press buttons to get the girl to the top of the buildings.
From these powdery levels emerges a profound weirdness. The architecture reveals impossible perspectives. From the very first painting, Ida walks along a footbridge that forms a Penrose triangle, a geometric shape whose edges overlap without one knowing what is inside or outside. The game is thus placed under the sign of illusion.
Against the current
Combining brevity and lack of difficulty, the game costs a handful of euros - an aberration in the small world of mobile video games, which at the time favored free downloadable experiences, but where the player was encouraged to buy elements that would make him progress. At first glance, nothing was going to work. And yet, the magic happened.
“Monument Valley has a sophisticated aesthetic that stands in stark contrast to the canon of the time. The App Store was dominated by Clash of Clans, Candy Crush Saga and Angry Birds,” recalls Ken Wong, the design manager. “Everyone thought mobile games were cheap experiences. They might have been addictive, but they weren’t cutting edge in terms of art and design.”
Regretting the rudimentary graphics of iPhone and iPad games, this Australian dreams of an experience inspired by the high-end design of Apple devices. The first sketches he proposed to Ustwo were oriented towards minimalism and clever color schemes. The Monument Valley concept emerged from one of them. “I had drawn a building floating in the air with a little character on it,” he says. “I hung it on the wall and a lot of people would stop and tell me it was interesting.”
All the elements are in place, except for one detail : optical illusions. They come later, by accident, when the developers are making 3D levels in their software. They then try to avoid perspective problems, sometimes in vain. These architectural aberrations intrigued the team but seduced Ken Wong who integrated them harmoniously into the imaginary architecture of the levels, for which he was inspired by buildings in India and the Middle East. The works of Dutch artist M. C. Escher (1898-1972) are also among his influences. “His work is iconic and timeless because it goes beyond optical illusion. It tells stories,” he says.
“Here, elegance is not only graphic. It was our watchword,” explains the very voluble Danny Gray, who considers that the purity of the concept must be underlined by the simplicity of its execution. “Elegance in a video game means that we don’t offer the player twenty possible actions: we reduce them to the maximum, three to five on average, and we make sure that the player has everything he needs on the screen.”
Beauty can be popular
“Monument Valley is not only for those who find video games too long, it also proposes to make them easier. But, paradoxically, making it simple is complex. Difficulty is at the heart of many games,” Ken Wong notes. “But in ours, we want the player to get through it. We think they can find fun elsewhere and we want to make it immersive. The puzzles are not there to block the player, but rather act as playful interactions with the scenery. The game thus relies on exploration and its poetry.”
At the time, this philosophy was still marginal in the mainstream video game industry. There have always been poetic and auteurist productions that scratch the surface of the adage - dear to some gamers - that a good game must be difficult. But, as Portal and Journey did a few years earlier on PC and console, Monument Valley proves that beauty can also become popular on mobile.
The development of a videogame work is often confronted with multiple constraints such as financial pressure to minimize costs, the requirement of profitability or tight manufacturing deadlines... Danny Gray, who used to work for large structures, says he enjoys knowing nothing of this for Monument Valley. Indeed, Ustwo is not a traditional video game studio, but a digital creation agency. Based in London's trendy Shoreditch district, it reinjects some of the profits from its applications produced for major retailers (Tesco, Adidas, Barclays...) into creative projects.
The two founders of Ustwo cultivate an image of troublemakers and say they are not concerned about previous commercial failures, like their first game, Whale Trail, or the interactive fiction application Papercuts. Without hiding the fact that they lost money, they emphasize the innovative aspect of these creations. The agency then uses these original productions as a showcase for its know-how to clients.
The format is set
This time, they won’t make a flop. Monument Valley, which cost them over 720,000 euros, was an immediate success. Launched at a price of 3.59 euros, the application brought in more than 120,000 euros on the first day. Apple, which believed in the project, put it at the top of its application store. Praised by the press, it won recognition from its peers by winning an Apple Design Award and two prestigious Bafta awards, including the one for best British game. “It was a time when people were fed up with disposable games on smartphones. There was a real desire for games with substance,” says Ken Wong.
Monument Valley is in the heart of time. It even appears in the series House of Cards and in Apple’s iPhone ads. Despite some “quickly dispelled controversies” about the brevity of the game, Ken Wong is living a “dream”. After working on additional levels of the game, he refuses to take charge of its sequel, which will be released in 2017. The Australian with the pink-dyed hair is homesick, so he packs his bags and founds Mountains Studios in Melbourne in 2016. His second game, Florence, is (again) very short and (again) critically acclaimed. The format is settled.
Mancunian Danny Gray, meanwhile, is still enjoying himself at Ustwo Games, where he has become creative manager. The 72 million downloads of Monument Valley - according to the figures communicated to Le Monde by the London studio - have not made his head spin. The company wants to remain modest: it has only about 30 employees and pursues the artistic ambitions set since 2013. In the meantime, Ustwo has signed the delicious Assemble, Care and Alba, whose quality has been praised, while waiting for the release of Monument Valley 3.
Since then, many clones of the game have been created, with some “spiritual heirs” not shy about plundering the successful formula. “Monument Valley is only 90 minutes long, but people still remember it eight years later. That’s the kind of exercise we set out to do,” says Danny Gray, proud that such a short adventure can leave such a lasting impression.
