Definition
Perspective tricks are a mechanic in which what the board actually is depends on where you look from. The player's verbs are camera verbs: rotate, peer, pick up and put down, photograph. What changes each turn is not the position of a piece. It is only how the world looks from the current viewpoint.
The win condition is apparent connection. If the route to the goal is unbroken on screen, it can be walked, even when the real three-dimensional coordinates are far apart. In most puzzles, appearance is only evidence about an underlying reality. Here that relation is inverted, and the game reads only the picture at the moment the player stops the camera.
Origins and lineage
The prehistory is on paper and in a room. The Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd drew the impossible triangle in 1934, and Lionel and Roger Penrose published it in the British Journal of Psychology in February 1958 as "impossibility in its purest form." Escher used the same triangle in his 1961 lithograph Waterfall. In three dimensions there is Adelbert Ames Jr.'s distorted room: viewed through a peephole with one eye, the cues to size are stripped away and two people of the same height look like a giant and a dwarf. The patent dates from 1940, but the year it was first built is given as 1934 by some sources and 1946 by others, and cannot be pinned down.
The digital first is echochrome, 2008. The PSP version shipped in Japan on 19 March and in North America on 1 May. Sony Computer Entertainment published it, with Japan Studio among the developers. Its foundation was Jun Fujiki's research on the OLE Coordinate System, which treats camera position as part of the coordinate system; the game adopted that as its rule. Official material cites Reutersvärd and Escher's Relativity as sources.
The lineage then split three ways. Rotate-to-align was carried forward by FEZ (2012, Steam 2013) and Monument Valley (mobile 2014, Steam 2022). Perspective-as-size is Superliminal, whose origin is the demo Museum of Simulation Technology, released by Albert Shih at Carnegie Mellon's ETC in January 2014; Pillow Castle Games shipped the full game on 12 November 2019. Cut-and-paste reaches Viewfinder (Sad Owl Studios, 2023). The lineage is set out in A vocabulary for perspective puzzles.
Variations
The first variation is rotation. Monument Valley lets you grip part of an impossible building and turn it until a broken staircase joins up to the eye. FEZ folds three-dimensional terrain into four two-dimensional views, so which face you look from changes where the platforms sit. Both rotate, but one makes a single joint and the other swaps the projection of the whole world; they feel nothing alike.
The second variation translates perspective into size. In Superliminal, an object put down along your line of sight takes its apparent size as its real one. Maquette uses nested copies of one garden, so a thing left in the small garden is enormous in the large one. The latter overlaps recursion and nesting; the word scale joins the two mechanics.
The third variation cuts and pastes. In Viewfinder, placing a photograph makes the place in it real. Moncage joins one image across adjacent faces of a cube, and Gorogoa stacks four panels so one becomes the continuation of another. Manifold Garden makes gravity rather than the camera the verb, but uses the same illusion in its endlessly repeating scenery.
Design pitfalls
First, the verb stops developing. A rule about viewpoint can be stated in one sentence, which leaves little room to extend once it is learned. The counter-take on Superliminal calls it the sharpest criticism of that game: the perspective verb stops growing halfway through, and the rest runs on staging and atmosphere. A viewpoint verb on its own also multiplies positions slowly, so most shipped games add a secondary verb — push, carry, jump, photograph. Choose the wrong one and the viewpoint becomes decoration, and the game falls back into being an ordinary three-dimensional action game.
Second, hunting for the angle turns into brute force. If a solution exists at exactly one viewpoint, the player ends up spinning the camera and waiting for luck. One player's account of the new Escape Simulator 2 room describes that particular exhaustion. The realisation that a dead end was an angle, not a path is a pleasure — but only when enough cues point at the right angle.
Third, the body. Because this mechanic makes the player's own perception the verb, long sessions are tiring, and reports of motion sickness are more common than with other mechanics. A vocabulary for perspective puzzles reads Monument Valley's roughly ninety-minute length as a running time designed around that fatigue. Here, length is not a virtue but a design variable.
How to tell it apart
The difference from impossible space is whether the world returns when the viewpoint does. Here it does: put the camera back and the picture is as it was, because only the picture ever changed. In Antichamber or Hyperbolica, returning to the same place gives you a different space. That is not an illusion; the rules of the space itself differ.
Panel composition and portals are close neighbours. The first moves frames rather than the viewpoint; the second joins two points permanently, regardless of how they look. Recursion and nesting overlaps on scale, but its layers exist whether or not the camera moves. When in doubt, ask whether adjudication happens at the moment the camera stops.
Further reading
On this site. The overview is A vocabulary for perspective puzzles — from Monument Valley to Manifold Garden. For history, echochrome (2008) and Monument Valley (2014), and further back Get Off the Earth (1896).
On designers: Ken Wong, William Chyr, Jason Roberts and Alexander Bruce. For a critical reading, the counter-take on Superliminal. From the music side, the soundtracks of Superliminal, Viewfinder and Monument Valley. From a player who gets stuck, changing your viewpoint is not cheating.
Outside sources. On the impossible triangle: L. S. Penrose and R. Penrose, "Impossible Objects: A Special Type of Visual Illusion", British Journal of Psychology 49(1), 1958. echochrome rests on Jun Fujiki's OLE (Object Locative Environment) Coordinate System. Superliminal's prototype is Albert Shih's 2014 demo Museum of Simulation Technology.
On the table
- Get Off the Earth (1896) — turn the disc a little and the thirteen figures you can count become twelve. What moves is the cut pieces, not the viewpoint, but it exploits the same habit: believing that what you see is what is there.
See also
Impossible Space / Panel Composition / Portals / Recursion & Nesting / Light & Shadow
