If like us you fell in the love with the world of Monument Valley the first time around, you’ll be pleased to hear that the ‘Forgotten Shores’ expansion will be landing November 13th.
Monument Valley originally touched down back in April earlier this year and quickly won over gamers with its beautiful art style, fantastic game design, immersive auditory experience and the mysterious world in which you helped Ida; the little princess in white, navigate. According to its creators its success can be measure by the 1.4 million+ downloads it’s accumulated across iOS and Android since launch.
However, Ken Wong and the rest of the team at UsTwo; the game’s developers, hinted from the offset that the monuments which featured in the original game came from only a handful of the ideas and designs that they’d been experimenting with. Now the Forgotten Shores expansion is on the way and it looks like we’ll finally see some new lands and fresh concepts to wrap our heads around.
Peter Pashley, Monument Valley’s technology director explains “It was kind of a good excuse for us to do what we enjoy doing and let some of those concepts that had been wandering around at the back of our minds actually see the light of day.”
Notice we’ve been calling the Forgotten Shores update an expansion and not a sequel. The ten levels from the original game helped create a complete story arc for Ida, so finding where these additional levels would slot into in the world was a significant challenge.
Executive producer of the game, Dan Gray said, “It’s very much a self-contained experience. So the question was, how do we create something that doesn’t disrupt that?” As a result, eight new levels will appear just over the halfway point of the original story, not long after meeting Totem, Ida’s sole companion in Monument Valley.
The focus of the new levels will be to enrich the story of Ida’s journey, but also showcase a number of more complex mechanics that the team didn’t have time to introduce to the player in the original ten levels. From the early artwork we’ve spotted chains, twisted walkways, water wheels and one puzzle that’s solution requires a combination of light and sound to solve.
We’re itching to re-enter the world of Monument Valley and discovering the Forgotten Shores looks like the perfect way to do so. UsTwo promised that the new expansion would arrive in the original game’s next update, scheduled for November 13th. It’ll appear as an in-app purchase within the original game, priced at $1.99 (we’re expecting a UK price of around £1.49), which in our opinion seems like a steal.
As with the original game’s launch, iOS users will get first dibs on the expansion, with Android following soon after, hopefully within a month of its initial launch.
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