Making a Monument Valley for the Netflix generation

Monument Valley 3 is releasing today, ten years after the series debuted, and a mirror of developer Ustwo Games’ evolution during that time.

Having dabbled in DLC, subscriptions services, and games championing communities and the natural world, Ustwo seems to have taken these experiences and poured them into the highly awaited third opus of its star franchise.

Monument Valley 3 introduces new characters and mechanics (like sailing), a larger world, and a brand new standalone story, but it also introduces a live service approach, with Ustwo looking to release new content with every real-life season. In between these big chapters, the developer will also regularly release new activities and puzzles. All of this will take place exclusively on Netflix, with the company’s games branch acting as the mobile title’s publisher.

For some people, this step into live service may seem surprising coming from Ustwo, but it’s a natural evolution from what it’s been doing for the past decade.

Both Monument Valley 1 and 2 had DLC, 2019’s Assemble with Care was a pioneer of subscription services as an (initially) Apple Arcade exclusive, and 2022’s Desta: The Memories Between was already a Netflix title.

“At Ustwo, most of [our] games have been about respecting players’ time – these smaller experiences that are meaningful, things that you remember outside of that,” Monument Valley 3 director Jennifer Estaris tells GamesIndustry.biz.

“But for Monument Valley, [we’ve] always done downloadable content. It’s just less rhythmic, less predictable, when they come out. And so for me, it was about: how do we make that a healthy habit for players, where they can know that something is coming and they get excited about it? But also tied to the themes of the game about caring for the world, not just being a one-and-done experience.”

Estaris says that Ustwo wants to be very conscious about managing players’ time, and is experimenting on the right way to deliver these content updates so it feels satisfactory and not exploitative – a pitfall that’s common in mobile, but doesn’t match the company’s values.

“That’s what we’re experimenting with,” she continues. “People are expecting everything every day. What if we give it to them every week or every month? Will they still feel that same satisfaction? Will they still remember to come back? That will be what we get to discover,” she smiles.

Monument Valley 3’s lead designer Emily Brown describes the studio’s plans for the title’s updates as “Monument Valley snacks.”

“We’re just hoping to find that space where people like being in this world, and the feeling they get from being there”Emily Brown

“Some of the work has been done and is being finessed and polished, and we still still want that openness, to see how things land, and adapt as we progress through those seasons,” Brown continues.

“But it’s been really interesting thinking about [these] little Monument Valley snacks you can have. Like, ‘Oh, I just want to go back and have a little bit of this thing I like’. And then come back again another time, and build up to those. We’re just hoping to find that space where people like being in this world, and the feeling they get from being there.”

Approaching Monument Valley 3 as an evolving game meant adapting to another type of development journey, lead producer John Lau tells us.

“The challenges are methodological but [also] kind of attitudinal,” he says. “You kind of have to be in a different mindset from ‘there’s this perfect thing that we’re gonna change right until the last minute’, and moving into something a bit more sustainable.

“But also, it’s got a life after launch. And, in some senses, there is a bit of: let’s keep stuff in the tank. You have to stop changing things earlier and start thinking about this other thing, and that’s not been an easy transition for sure.

“That said, that attitude of constantly iterating, and maybe iterating slightly too late in the process and making other things, are good things you can take into a post-launch model. And to be clear, I don’t think we’re in a situation where we’re going to be scrutinising data and changing a thing to optimise player engagement. That’s not the mix.”

Lau shares that Ustwo has about the first season “and a bit” of content pretty much ready to go.

“I don’t think Monument Valley 3 would be a Monument Valley game if it had to mould itself to the requirements of a free- to-play model in order to survive”John Lau

We discuss how the studio historically was a poster child for premium games on mobile, and how it seems to have successfully transitioned into a bit of a poster child for games on subscription platforms, without compromising its vision in the process.

“That’s an interesting observation because, in retrospect, it does kind of make sense. If you make your name on [creating] very honed, finely crafted, premium experiences and then free-to-play hits and then the subscription model comes out… [If] you’ve made enough of a name for yourself, then of course you’re going to gravitate towards a subscription service.

“Personally, I don’t think Monument Valley 3 would be a Monument Valley game if it had to mould itself to the requirements of a free- to-play model in order to survive. So it could only have survived on a subscription service, regardless of who that was with.”

Ustwo has worked with both Apple and Netflix in the past, and historically had a strong bond with Apple. So we ask how the team landed with Netflix as a partner for this particular project.

“Monument Valley was known for being a pioneer in the mobile game space when it first came out, for these beautiful, small screen experiences,” Estaris starts, echoing our discussion with Lau. “So what we’re always excited by is how we can be a pioneer in other spaces, and I think Netflix Games – especially with what the platform offers, the films and shows – was an exciting opportunity for us, [with] the higher stakes and cinematic elements [of Monument Valley 3].

“We are still working with Apple on different products but it seemed like what this game wanted to be about fit really well with what Netflix is hoping to do.”

Beyond the business model considerations, the team had to face the added challenge of following up on previous Monument Valley games, which have “cast such a long shadow,” as Lau puts it.

“One particular problem is that it’s very difficult to start out with a very specific vision of how a Monument Valley game sets out,” he says.

“If you set out making puzzles with a view to hitting specific story beats, they are not very good puzzles”John Lau

“With game development in general, it’s a very squiggly base, and it’s kind of writhing, and you have to wrestle with, ‘Okay, this is what you are. Cool. Right.’ We had an idea of what the themes were, but when it comes to story and the main beats, defining that upfront was very difficult to do because, if you set out making puzzles with a view to hitting specific story beats, they are not very good puzzles.”

So the team had to work the other way around, retroactively building the story around its puzzles, with Lau describing it as “reviewing a documentary’s rushes” and shaping the story from there.

Brown adds: “I think the big challenge with Monument Valley is finding the balance between the story and the play experience, and weaving through that. And sometimes you’re leaning more into ‘I’m gonna really hit this story beat’, and that’s the focus, so it’s not going to be a really difficult puzzle. And then moving back into, ‘Now we’re going to noodle your brain a little bit’ or ‘Now I’m going to chill you out’. And there’s this sort of weaving that happens between leaning into puzzles and impossibility, and then into story and so on. So finding that balance is a challenge.”

Visually, the challenge for lead artist Lili Ibrahim and her team was to create something fresh and new while retaining the DNA of what the Monument Valley games look like.

“Monument Valley has its roots in graphic design, and the first Monument Valley game is almost a time capsule of graphic design [circa] 2014 and what felt exciting and fresh then,” Ibrahim tells us. “So my goal was to see if I could recreate some of that feeling about 2024. So what does that mean?

“I was looking a lot at graphic design trends today, poster design, editorial treatments. And outside of games, always. We always try to draw from outside of games because another strength of the first Monument Valley is that it doesn’t look like a game. And that was achieved by not drawing direct references from games, but looking at graphic design, architecture, poetry.”

A big advantage that the team had was being able to consult directly with some of the people behind the original Monument Valley games, as a lot of them are still at Ustwo Games to this day.

“It’s a really wonderful thing – with caveats! – to still be working at the studio [alongside] those people who made those games, and you can ask them those questions… But it is a blessing and a curse,” Lau laughs.

“It’s a curse because they have their own things they didn’t get to do on those games, or the things they pick up on are very small. And when you bring that lens to something which is still very nascent, that can be very difficult and jarring. But [overall] having the people who worked on those games around is just great to begin with.”

Being able to draw on that historical knowledge sounds like an asset then, but the team very much made the game their own eventually. In fact, when we talked to Ustwo Games’ chief creative officer Danny Gray earlier this year, he was keen to point out that having a brand new team work on the studio’s beloved IP was very much an intentional choice, to keep things fresh and not it being “the same group of six, eight [guys].”

“[It’s] that change from a past life to a different life, and how we form a new community together”Jennifer Estaris

He also told us at the time that Ustwo’s development process heavily relies on ‘”ensuring that creatives can inject some personal stories and feelings into the things that [they] make,” with each game intrinsically linked to its team’s lived experiences.

We ask the Monument Valley 3 team what their imprint on the title is.

“I’m feeling an hesitance to name it because what I don’t want is for that to be kind of an answer and then for [people] to play the game and be like, ‘Wait, that’s not in there at all!’,” Lau prefaces.

“Because inevitably what you do is you kind of imbue all of this richness and experience into a game like Monument Valley, where the narrative framing is so subtle, and often it’s very hard to pick up on. But there being so much variety in the backgrounds and the experiences of the team obviously has [an impact].

“You could post rationalise and interpret a game which is about the formation of a community in circumstances which are averse, and the attempt to kind of get along. In our early conversations and relating our lived experience, there was so much specificity in that, and actually we had to kind of strip away the detail and just focus on the core of it, which is about keeping community together and getting along. But the risk is that they become so abstract that they become meaningless. You also want to make it sufficiently universal so that someone who is feeling that particular way about community can latch onto it.”

Estaris shares that most of the Monument Valley 3 team are immigrants or second generation immigrants, and that questioning the reasons why people move was at the core of the early interrogations around the title.

“We had incubation sprints where we were like, ‘Let’s make some puzzles based on a theme’,” Estaris recalls. “One of the themes was ‘created family’, another theme was ‘movement together’. I think it’s those themes we then untangled and spun out into the main pillars of our game. So [it’s] that change from a past life to a different life, and how we form a new community together.”

Ahead of Monument Valley 3’s launch, the two previous titles in the franchise also released on Netflix, with Estaris telling us the publisher is happy with their commercial performances. Between that and positive reviews of the game, the hope is that Monument Valley 3 will perform equally well.

“I’m most excited about the future of the Monument Valley world,” Estaris smiles. “What else could it mean? How far can we push that envelope? But that’s to come, we haven’t made it yet. There are lots of seeds for this…”