Monument Valley 3 review – calm, beautiful and a little bit of a sense of progress

UsTwo's slightly airy beauty benefits from some new ideas.

I've always found the Monument Valley games to be a bit frustrating because they're beautiful, creative things, but don't seem to give the player much space. They are quietly misinformed in this regard. With their fixed point of view, Persian influence, and love of Escherian geometry, they seem like the perfect brain-burning puzzle game. In fact, they're more like Uncharted than Echochrome or Smash. The plan is laid out for you and you can't really deviate from it. Reach your goals, know your place, and leave your curiosity to all the visual tricks the developers play on you.

This depends somewhat on the design, which has offered two main types of puzzles in the past. In it, you can use trick perspective to create impossible paths – if two planes look like they're lined up in this world, you can treat them like they are. And then there's another one where you interact with switches or sliding gizmos or twisting things and the world around you changes. The game's little spiers and tower tops curl, split, and flip over, and you're left with new baubles.

These things look very elegant and beautiful, but in a game about getting from A to B on every screen, that means you're at the mercy of the designers' energy. You can't really read the landscape and draw a path through it because you don't know what the landscape is capable of at any one point. You're along for the ride, which feels suboptimal in a game like this, even if it's a very pretty ride.

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This is why I found the first two Monument Valleys frustrating. The third one frustrated me because it had all the problems of the first two, until suddenly it no longer existed. You get a few levels where new ideas pop up, and they're just as fun, expressive, and fun to tinker with as you could hope. And then it's game over – now. It ends and it feels like it began.

We'll get to that last point later. But for much of its campaign, Monument Valley 3 continues the series' love for the beauty of effortless interaction. However, even here there are some changes. There was a new yearning for open space, where you could briskly blast through the waves in a boat or race through cornfields. But the game doesn't have much idea about what to do with these open spaces, so you're usually just moving from one puzzle area to the next.

Likewise, the new focus is on working with other characters – using them to weight switches and trigger events, etc. This fable-like story packs an emotional punch as these characters are separated and reunited, but as always, it all feels too fable-like. This feels like a really good Waitrose advert, so I suspect there's a bit of real emotion here.

Moving the character leads to a mid-game sequence where Monument Valley 3 struggles to find a real puzzle, but it fails for a strange reason. It's a game that's very poised in its demo and very good at leading you by the nose, but when you have to move some of the other guys around and work within the confines of what they're capable of doing in each situation, it falls apart It got really bad. Feel confused. The game isn't clear enough in explaining how it works and what each part will and won't do, so you end up just muddle through as before.

I'm extremely frustrated with this game and I'm deeply sorry. It's stunningly beautiful at every stage, offering calm, perfectly balanced images and landscapes that you'll be eager to explore if the game allows it. But the way it unfolds is too restrictive. It doesn't want to get ugly or make you find your own solution, even if it's a stuck solution. It has all these wonderful animations for you and wants you to see them with your own eyes: towers sinking into the sea, palace walls cracking, light falling from the sky. It's beautiful, but as a whole it also feels a little suffocating, a little lifeless.

Change does happen gradually. It starts out gently, with early levels exploding with the game's color treatment that's a little too busy, while later levels show you two landscapes with an unusual relationship to each other. Then we introduced more organic elements, and finally a brilliant idea that I won't spoil, but it allows you to change the plane you're on in an incredibly satisfying way.

Very cute indeed. For three or so levels, Monument Valley 3 offers a gorgeous world that you can really modify. A world you can get stuck in until the solution rolls into your brain, and then – oh yes, it's all that simple! In these levels, you can make mistakes and work extra hard, and when you finally get from A to B, you'll feel like you earned it and like you could have solved a lot of problems right from the start. It's great to see a beautiful thing turn into a fun game.

I just wish the campaign had a little more of this. I wish developer Ustwo would have discovered great new ideas sooner and spent less time in the prison of good taste that this series has struggled to escape. But this is the last thing. This is not the end. After completing the ten campaign missions, you'll see a screen telling you that there are more missions and that the game will continue to evolve over the coming months.

Of course, the screen that tells you this is beautiful – the way the fonts, line weights, illustrative frames come together. But it also gave me a bit of real hope. At some points, at least the series itself seems to be heading to new places. I just hope it gets here sooner.

Publisher Netflix provided a copy of Monument Valley 3 for review.