The first guardian is dead, and the emotions have scattered. In Monowave you’re the newly-born second guardian, and you must use the emotions’ own powers to reunite them and bring peace back to the land.
Monowave is a platform puzzle game which revolves around switching emotions to navigate through increasingly complex levels and worlds. However, unlike most platformers out there that dabble with interchangeable powers, you can only have one active at once, and those same emotions also fuel the obstacles that block your quest.
Before we get into that though, it’s probably best to define the emotions. Happiness turns things yellow, and when you’re in possession of the emotion you can jump higher than normal. Sorrow turns things blue, and allows you to swim but also to shrink down to a smaller size (get low). Anger allows you to wall jump, and turns you — and the other creatures it infects — red. Finally, Anxiety turns things green and, perhaps most critically of all of the emotions, it makes you immune to damage.
With that explained, hopefully you’re starting to get a picture of a level layout. You might need to carefully evade enemies until you gain a power that allows you to traverse a route around (or through) them. But, if you can’t beat them, then you certainly can join them by converting them to the colour that you are — pacifying most monsters, but also changing the way you interact with them. For instance, if you change a red alligator to green then it’ll launch you — if you’re yellow — into the air.
There’s a beautiful simplicity to Monowave which, when paired with it’s almost chalk-drawing art style, really matches the clever use of colour and sound. Even the boss fight, which I experienced while at Devcom earlier this year, had a really satisfying, welcoming approachability to it that made it hard to walk away from.
Monowave is expected to launch later this year for both Windows and Mac.
