After nearly half a century of puzzle-platformers, developers are still managing to come up with original mechanics. In MONOWAVE, the debut title by a small team in South Korea, your abilities change depending on your emotional state. Passing through coloured plants and certain creatures will evoke an emotion in the player character Mono, which will impart special abilities. A happy Mono jumps higher, while an angry one can jump up walls. In sorrow, Mono shrinks to fit through previously impassable gaps in walls, and an anxious Mono is, for some reason, immune to damage.
The secret sauce is that the creatures Mono meets also change their behaviour depending on the emotion they are experiencing. Mono has the power to influence their emotions, thus changing their behaviour, which in turn can alter the environment. The first alligator Mono meets is angry (red). It will bite Mono if they are in range, and if successful, Mono will take damage. So far so predictable. A few minutes later, Mono meets an anxious (green) alligator. Initially assuming the colour to be cosmetic, I kept my distance until I noticed a pictogram depicting the alligator boosting Mono onto a platform just out of their reach. I approached, and the alligator did indeed help me reach this platform. The next time I encountered an out-of-reach platform, the alligator below was happy (yellow) and paid me no mind. The pictogram mystified me at first. It turned out that it was telling me to make Mono whistle to transfer their current emotion (anxiety) to the happy alligator to make it throw Mono into the air as before.
The catch is that Mono can only transfer the emotion they are currently experiencing, and in transferring it, Mono ceases to experience it and thus loses the powers it conferred. Furthermore, any time Mono passes through an emotion-containing plant, their emotion will change, whether or not that change is desired. Traversal involves less platforming prowess than logic. You need to figure out which emotions will make the surrounding creatures behave in ways that benefit Mono, how to access and impart those emotions, and which emotions Mono needs to experience to perform the necessary platforming. Thankfully, the game provides several resources to assist players in these tasks. There is an in-game codex that keeps track of all the creatures Mono meets and their observed behaviours. This feature helped jog my memory between my playings of the demo and the full release. There is also an in-game hint system that will walk the player through the sequence of steps required to progress.
MONOWAVE boasts a surprising amount of variety, both in its terrain and creatures. Although there are only 18 creatures in the codex, that number is effectively quadrupled since each creature has 4 behaviours. Each world boasts about 10 stages, the last culminating in a boss encounter that puts the player’s knowledge of the emotions and their effects on Mono and other creatures to the test. And the bosses play remarkably differently. For instance, one was a chase, while the next was more akin to a bullet hell. At the end of these encounters, Mono gains new abilities they can perform when they are experiencing the emotion of the associated boss, which deepens the emotions’ utility and adds variety to the gameplay.
I volunteered to review MONOWAVE in large part because I was intrigued by the promise of a game that explores the ways in which our ability to act depends on our emotional state. While this did yield interesting traversal puzzles, Monowave wasn’t able to explore this theme as fully as I was hoping it to, in large part because the game is essentially wordless, aside from a brief cutscene at the beginning. Tellingly, when I was playing this game with my daughter, we referred to the emotions as yellow, red, purple, and green, not happiness, anger, sorrow, and anxiety. In fact, before sitting down to write this review, I had to consult the codex to make sure I had the correct labels for each emotion.
MONOWAVE offers couch co-op on a single screen. Player 2 controls Prism, a flying diamond. Prism can help Mono spread emotions, but since Mono can also do this, Prism’s contributions are never required to progress. For my preview article, I tried coop with my husband, but he quickly lost interest. In playing the full game, I tested out my theory that Prism’s role might be more appealing for a child. Indeed, my 7-year-old did have fun playing as Prism. But we also encountered a few obstacles to our enjoyment of coop mode. It’s currently impossible to access most of the accessibility options in coop play. The hint button doesn’t do anything because Prism is also the character the game uses to convey hints. For some reason, “support” (no-damage) mode is also inaccessible as an option when playing cooperatively. The result was that when my daughter and I couldn’t figure out what to do, we’d need to exit the level and reload (from the start) as a solo player so I could access the hint system.
The upshot for this review is that I have played several levels, both solo and coop, which is not something I would have done otherwise. Doing so revealed more differences between these modes than I initially surmised. In the world of sorrow, for instance, Prism’s duties expanded to providing illumination to an environment that was otherwise shrouded in darkness. When I replayed these levels solo, I could see the entire screen but took damage from the cold. Eventually, I realized that the steam vents weren’t decorative in solo play but served as waystations for Mono to recuperate warmth.
At least some of the times we got stuck were, I suspect, because we were playing in coop mode. Since Prism is smaller than Mono and has the power of flight, Prism can venture into spaces Mono cannot. This means that my daughter and I sometimes solved puzzles in different ways than the developers intended. While this is not necessarily a problem, it caused trouble for us because it sometimes meant that we were able to progress without fully understanding the mechanics the game was attempting to teach us. And when we needed to apply our knowledge of these mechanics later on, we couldn’t.
In short, MONOWAVE appears to have been designed first and foremost as a solo experience. Playing coop somewhat disturbs the tautness of its design. A better approach would have been to have levels specifically designed for coop play, as in Portal 2 or Pikuniku, though this would have required much more time and resources. If coop is retained in the main campaign, the game should force players to play through the initial level, since this is the only place Prism’s role is explained. Prism shouldn’t be able to venture into areas Mono cannot, and all accessibility options should still be available.
