High Concept, Low Reward: The Frustrating Contradiction of Monowave
I love when a game isn't afraid to try new things, get its hands dirty, and makes a few mistakes along the way. There are indie titles out there that really swing for the fences in terms of bold new mechanics, genre mash-ups, and everything in between. Monowave is an interesting specimen that attempts to introduce a novel emotional mechanic, presenting itself in a very indie, almost arthouse sort of way. I would love to say that developer Studio BBB Inc. stuck the landing, but the more I played Monowave, the more I hated it.
Monowave is a game about emotions. Rather, it uses the names of emotions to describe different states that the main character, Mono, can shift into—ostensibly to bypass whatever obstacle is blocking the critical path. It all checks out on paper, but I have to make something clear about how rewarding game design actually works.
Clever adventure and platforming games will hand you a power-up only after teasing you with a path you can’t take or a puzzle you can’t solve. When you finally discover the solution to that puzzle that’s stumped you, you have that "aha!" moment.
Rinse, repeat, throw in some interesting enemy and boss encounters and baby, you have a stew going. There’s a reason for that formula: it feels good. It directly taps into the dopamine center and rewards the player, telling them not only "you did this!" but "you’re a very clever player."
Monowave completely abandons any sense of cleverness. Sure, it possesses a whimsical and charming art style—and while I definitely overuse the word “charming,” it really does fit here. It has side-scrolling. Boy, it does that, too! With platforming!
But it’s all executed in a way that feels like the developers either haven’t played a modern video game, or they just don’t care to engage with one. The movement feels tight enough, but almost every interaction with the world is incredibly superficial.
There is no satisfying sense of progression or discovery. You never have to backtrack to use a newly found item in a clever way. In fact, almost every ability or emotional state you need to progress is handed to you right in front of the obstacle it solves. It's the equivalent of putting a locked door in a game and leaving the key on the floormat, so puzzles are usually about positioning and timing.
Monowave tasks you with shifting between four emotional states—Happiness, Sorrow, Anger, and Anxiety. On paper, it sounds great. Happiness grants an empowered jump, Sorrow lets Mono squeeze through tight passages, Anger unlocks wall-jumping, and Anxiety lets you safely tip-toe over hazards like brambles.
You can even pass these emotions to enemies to change their behavior, like making a creature angry so it burns down a plant blocking your path. But instead of layering these mechanics into complex, brain-teasing encounters, the game just sets up simple locks and immediately hands you the corresponding emotional key.
It’s a puzzle game, so I always have to emphasize that puzzle difficulties can vary wildly between people–but in this case it wasn’t about difficulty, but about the entire setup.
It might seem like I’m being hard on Monowave, and I probably am. But it’s just not a very good game. It’s always difficult to look at something that clearly had love, energy, and skill poured into it, just to tell you all that it falls flat. It does have a great art style—I love the bright colors and the hand-drawn scratch-art aesthetic against the dark backgrounds. But that’s really the sole bright spot I can find from my time with it.
Ultimately, Monowave feels like one of those indie games I would cover years ago in an attempt to prove that video games were art, showcasing titles that highlight the visuals while ignoring the fact that they are barely games at all. For the record: all video games are art. I don’t need to validate that anymore. But not all art is good, and as a game, Monowave is not good. (I’m so sorry.)
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