Moncage is one of those puzzle games about intermittent light bulb moments. One minute you will see the solutions with perfect clarity. Next, you’ll be scratching your head and wondering how you’re going to continue. Of course, it wouldn’t be a puzzle game without a few moments like this, but when you’re playing mechanical puzzles on five possible surfaces – in this case edges and the top of a rotatable cube – Moncage can sometimes knock you out completely, leaving you at a standstill until you consult its series of timing hints (or, if you really desperate, an in-game video solution).
However, when the bulb glows and shines brightly, Moncage can actually be illuminated. As you rotate, adjust, and investigate its five little vignettes to align the bits that fit the scene in one tile to affect the corresponding bits in another, Optillion’s debut game returns. the best from Fireproof Studios’ Room series. It’s a beautifully crafted little thing, and it builds on my ideas to create some truly outstanding optical wizard moments. If only the story it was trying to tell was gentle.
You start in a lighthouse. While there aren’t as many levers and switches for twisting and pulling as The Room’s 3D puzzle boxes, Moncage still manages to feel like an interactive Rubik’s Cube on your screen. You’ll rotate each scene by swiping your mouse, clicking to interact with its various objects, and double-tapping particularly busy areas to zoom in and out of them. While each side presents a different scene, they all have elements in common, and it’s a bit confusing figuring out how to arrange them all to move through the story.
To give an early example, you could use the blue hatch in the floor of the lighthouse to form the other half of the broken bridge in the snowy urban factory placed on the tile next to it. Or maybe that bicycle wheel in the flooded storage room – which appears on the other side of the block after opening the aforementioned hatch – could be combined with a mechanical lever that looks a lot like in the central pillar of the lighthouse. post to allow you to change the angle of the pedal – which can then be used to unlock a portal in the factory cell I just mentioned.
It’s all about using perspective to your advantage, and at its best, Moncage feels like a digital origami fortuneteller, with deft manipulation revealing new and surprising things about these dynamic environments. There are too many standout sets to mention here, we also don’t want to spoil their surprise. But especially the war time series, where you’re moving the cube in real time to transport a bomb from a cannon across all five sides to get it to its intended destination.
At times like these, Moncage is another series of lightbulb moments. It’s a great responsive tool, even if mistakes can sometimes lead to a lot of repetitive setups on retry. But if you’re wondering how we got from a lovely idyllic lighthouse to cannon carnage and war, Moncage may not provide the answer you’re looking for. Its story is vaguely told through scenes presented in the cube, but even sharper narrative rhythms are captured in the collectible photographs you’ll find in the nooks and crannies. Hidden niches also fail to convey a deeper sense of connection and meaning.
As I understand it, it’s a story about a father and son who seem to become estranged after his son goes off to war in a military conflict that is somehow both modern and reminiscent. The War II. As he recovered and reintegrated into society from a trauma, he sank deeply into alcohol and fell into a state of despair. Then (and this is where Moncage lost me a bit), he seems to find redemption by adopting a boy, and the two of them eventually return to their father’s lighthouse to begin. new life – although when the game ends with the same suitcase of toys and stuff you open as you start, it also implies some nightmarish cycles of families being separated and reunited later a series of horrifying conflicts.
Trouble was, Moncage didn’t have anything interesting to say about the father-son relationship, or the war that kept them apart. Its abstract puzzles are clever for the sake of cleverness rather than story, and they rarely serve to teach you anything about the scene in question or say anything more in-depth about the location. its part in the story (though I would say the way some objects in the bar scene are transformed into war images when viewed through a beer glass is particularly well done).
Furthermore, the infinity of the whole event makes it difficult for setting and context to provide us with any kind of comment or criticism about its sequence of events. This is a place where drones, cannons, tanks and color TVs all jostle for the same headspace, and I’ve come to wonder what I’m going to get out of it all, especially after when it pulls both the son to become the father and the father to become the son of nonsense. It was just a giant leap in comics for me.
Combine that with a couple of furious puzzles that totally freak me out, not to mention a hint system that often patronizes because it’s so useful (especially since it doesn’t register any part of the puzzle you’ve already taken). complete), and Moncage can sometimes feel like it’s trying to be too smart for its own good. At three o’clock, it certainly couldn’t exceed its welcome, but its tumultuous story meant it didn’t linger long in memory either. However, if you’re a lover of puzzles, there’s certainly a lot to admire here, and I think the ingenuity of its kaleidoscope cube is enough to make for a compelling story. its lead. It might not quite be there with The Room as an all-time puzzle classic, but it’s probably the closest we’ve come to a spiritual successor in quite a while.
