2026-07-09 · retro-review
Monument Valley (2014) — Walking Impossible Architecture in Mobile's Golden Hour
Released for iOS on April 3, 2014, Monument Valley was made by a six-person team spun out of a London design agency, who turned Escher's impossible figures into architecture you could walk. Arriving when freemium apps dominated the App Store, it sold millions by betting on the opposite: paid, short, and dense. I re-read it as both a record of mobile gaming's golden hour and a node in the lineage of perspective puzzles.