First details released from Moncage

Written by Drew Onia — October 14, 2021 at 10:25

Sometimes in order to see something more clearly, a change in perspective is required. It’s a skill seasoned adventure gamers must harness, moving about an environment, examining details large and small in unusual ways. In Optillusion’s upcoming puzzler Moncage, doing so is the sole focus of the game, with a mysterious picture box bending dimensions in wholly unique ways.

The entire experience takes place within an interactive and rotatable cube, through which players will explore “multidimensional worlds” in “similar yet unique, adjacent yet distant” spaces by finding the right vantage point to draw hidden connections between them. A textless “dreamlike adventure” about a boy, his father, and a lighthouse accompanies the game’s dimension-twisting progression, with photographs hidden through the environments further highlighting details of the story.

Spanning a total of fifty scenes presented in clean, colourful, cel-shaded visuals, Moncage tasks players with solving more than sixty discrete environmental puzzles. An old factory, an amusement park, a church and more lay within, with players able to rotate the cube freely via intuitive mouse controls (or touch on mobile platforms). Triggering specific events across two, three, or even more adjoining sides, like aligning a lamppost with something else to illuminate it, or tipping a scale on one side to cycle through day and night, are the sorts of deceptively simple objectives sure to challenge any player’s spatial problem-solving capabilities. The intricate and subtle ways in which the environments are linked may appear random or unrelated until the right connections are made. If this all sounds a bit intimidating, Optillusion has included a “multitude of guidance systems" if needed, including text hints, highlighting key items to puzzle solutions, and even video walkthroughs.

If you're eager to see exactly what's in the box, you'll find out next month as Moncage is set to launch on Windows PC on Steam, along with mobile versions for iOS and Android devices on November 16th, 2021.