MONOWAVE is a fantastic puzzle platformer where the characters have emotions that you can use to better explore the environment.
I’ve played a lot of platformers in my time in video games, but I was really drawn in by the look of this one. The black background and the glowing, colorful lines of the world; I was just captivated by what I thought was a nice looking platformer. But then I was further delighted when I found something that felt very polished and unique.
MONOWAVE is a whimsical puzzle-adventure game about passing on your emotions to other creatures, changing how they (and you!) interact with the world. You start out as Mono, a newborn Guardian who is meant to protect all of the other emotions. They used to be together, helping each other, but then they got scared and scattered across the world. You need to travel around finding them and bringing them back together.
Traveling through different areas of the map, you can find creatures who have specific emotions. This is shown through their colors. The red, angry creatures run quickly and can harm you, but when you are filled with anger, you are able to wall jump with that fury. The light blue anxiety-filled creatures aren’t effected by the dangers in the environment itself, allowing you to bypass them if you have that emotion. Happiness increases your jump, as you are so delighted to get up higher. When you discover what each emotion’s power is, you can then use it to better explore the world around you.
And there is a lot to explore in MONOWAVE – hidden areas, little rainbow cubes to grab, and different exits. It’s quite joyful moving around levels and finding out what emotions you should use to discover those secrets and eventually make it over to the end of that area.
In the demo that I played at Devcom, I found the build to be very polished and just… fun! The developers explained that the soundtrack is asalso vibrant as the visuals (although the event space was a bit loud to really hear it). I look forward to seeing the full game when it’s released later this year.
MONOWAVE is currenty in development, but in the meantime, you can add it to your Steam Wishlist.
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