Soundtrack: Monument Valley — An accompaniment, not a guide

Introduction — the first note becomes a color

The silent princess Ida stands atop white isometric monuments. All the player does is rotate the view to make things 'look connected,' then turn that illusion into a path. In this optical-illusion puzzle that Komugi reviewed, the first thing to reach your ear is a beatless drone — a soft-edged pad with a single grain, like a distant bell, falling into it. The tempo is, roughly, so slow you lose any wish to count measures. Even I, who measure everything in BPM, put my hand down here.

The music is by Stafford Bawler, Obfusc (Joseph X. Burke) and Grigori — the trio credited on the official soundtrack released in July 2014. Bawler is a sound designer who came up through Colin McRae DiRT and Forza, and his work on Monument Valley won a 2014 Develop Award for Audio. The palette centers on bells, synth pads and faint strings, with edges deliberately blurred. Like the white architecture Ida walks, it is mostly empty space.

Monument Valley (from the official Steam screenshots)

Accompaniment, not a guide

ustwo's tech director Peter Pashley described the music philosophy this way: 'We wanted music that served as an accompaniment, not a guide.' In a 20-hour game, recurring stings that leave a residue in your ear can work, but Monument Valley ends in about two hours. Precisely because of that, forcing such motifs 'would lose power' — the minimalism is deliberate. That landed for me. Most puzzle games want sound to announce that you've gotten closer to the answer. This one nearly gives that up.

Instead, the sound clings to material and action. The sound design, built by Bawler and Dev Morgan in Tazman-Audio's Fabric, gives you the touch of the architecture itself — the sound of enormous marble slabs grinding as they slide. Pull a handle to rotate a column and, behind the mechanism, a single chord spills out. In place of the silent princess, the buildings have a voice. The puzzle input is, itself, one strike of an instrument.

The lineage of ambient — what was mixed to reach this temperature

Trace where this sound comes from and you find an interesting blend. The team names its foundations as Brian Eno and — the one I loved in Machinarium — Tomáš Dvořák, plus The Irresistible Force, early Aphex Twin, Tangerine Dream and Ry Cooder. Ambient stillness, with a single drop of the distant reverb of dub and folk. No flashy synth leads are poured in. That's why the aftertaste is dry and clear, like dusk over a desert.

The hidden link is the 'congruence' between image and sound. Monument Valley's architecture cannot exist in reality — it is Escher-like geometry that holds together only from a viewpoint. The music, too, has no firm tonal center; chords drift slowly and move to the next stage 'without ever landing.' Music that won't land, and staircases that shouldn't hold. Both are built on the same logic. So when you rotate the image the sound turns, and when you hear the sound the image turns.

The analogy with the puzzle — the drone fills the wait inside a rotation

What impressed me most here is the tempo design. The rhythm of solving Monument Valley isn't rapid trial and error. You grab a column, turn it slowly, and notice 'oh, it connected' — a chain of long single breaths. Put a ticking beat over that and it collides with the player's own breathing. So the music drops the pulse and fills the 'wait' with a drone. Those few seconds mid-rotation, when judgment hangs suspended — an edgeless chord fits exactly into that gap.

In other words, this music does not measure how fast you solve. Solve fast or slow, the same drone flows at the same temperature. Because the puzzle is designed so that time is never a competition, the music likewise refuses to keep time. Game design and music say the same short phrase — 'no need to hurry' — in two different languages.

Tracks worth hearing

Start with one official track. Obfusc's 'Amateur Cartography' is the opening cut of the soundtrack, and it carries the game's dry clarity intact. Below is the official audio (via The Orchard).

You can hear the whole album in order on the developer's official channel: ustwo games official SoundCloud: Monument Valley (Original Soundtrack) ↗. Playing it in sequence is where the 'stay an accompaniment' design reads clearest.

Closing — the one thing I'd steal

If I were writing music, this is what I'd steal: the courage not to celebrate a solve with sound. Announcing a correct answer with an SFX is easy, and it feels good. But Monument Valley swapped that hit of pleasure for the creak of a building and a single chord. Because the music doesn't over-narrate the player's sense of achievement, that achievement stays the player's own. By stepping back into accompaniment, it hands the lead role back to the player — a way of keeping distance that works well beyond puzzles.

If you revisit it, don't use it as work BGM; go at night, dim the room, and listen straight through. The chain of chords that never land quietly becomes a single landscape. For the same ambient lineage, I'd set Machinarium's Floex (Tomáš Dvořák) and the silence-driven Gorogoa right beside it. By the time the black coffee has gone cold, you'll probably want to return to that first note again.

References

・Steam: Monument Valley — Original Soundtrack

・ustwo games official SoundCloud: Monument Valley (Original Soundtrack)

・Apple Music: Monument Valley (Original Soundtrack) — Stafford Bawler, Obfusc & Grigori (credits)

・The Sound Architect: interview with sound designer Stafford Bawler

・Kotaku UK: The Making of Monument Valley (Peter Pashley on the music philosophy)