Monowave is a Delightful Indie Surprise

• Nintendo
• PC
• Reviews

Joe Cumbo

1 minute ago

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The debut title from Korean developer, Studio BBB, MONOWAVE is perhaps one of the year’s most delightful indie surprises, with striking visuals, unique gameplay and excellent value for money.

Emotional Core

Our main protagonist is Mono, a guardian spirit on a quest to reunite the stolen pieces of the Prism Tree over the course of just under fifty individual levels. While in his basic form Mono can do little more than move and jump, this changes as he gains access to numerous emotions throughout each level.

Joy increases your jump and movement speed, sadness allows you to slip under small gaps in a puddle of misery, anxiety offers a defence against hazards, and anger allows wall jumps. These abilities also receive upgrades throughout the game which expand your move set into something quite advanced, with dash moves, double jumps and more which expands the gameplay into a satisfying, if somewhat safe platformer.

I say all this because this is exactly what the trailers and store page largely focused on, but after a few minutes playing, a far more unique game mechanic started to emerge.

Foes Becoming Friends

You see, the emotions that Mono takes on can also be passed on to every single NPC in the game. Effectively turning each one into a puzzle mechanic with four separate forms to utilise. The gorilla for example, can help launch the player across a level when joyful, destroy barriers when angry, but also run away from the player when anxious.

Though not every single enemy has specific abilities for each emotion, the player is encouraged to experiment to progress, and I felt myself getting a real sense of how each emotion could be used even with unfamiliar NPCs as the game progressed. The end result is a deeply creative set of mechanics that interlink well with the more traditional platforming gameplay without overcomplicating it.

The underrated Yoshi and the Mysterious Book earlier this year had a similar emergent approach, but MONOWAVE putting this gameplay into a more traditional linear platformer helps it feel distinctly its own style of game. There are some occasional gameplay issues, with one specific boss fight and some late game precision platforming spiking the difficulty a bit too much, but the moment-to-moment gameplay ideas are excellent and feel fully realised by the end credits. Bolstering this is tight feeling gameplay feel and controls, with levels rarely overstaying their welcome as you progress through each of the four worlds and a nice balance between more platforming heavy stages, and the more puzzle focused ones.

Replay Value

With three unique collectables per stage unlocking numerous adorable cosmetics for Mono, there is a small modicum of replay value for players hoping for a little more content here.

With a harder difficulty and a handful of hidden stages, MONOWAVE comes to roughly 10+ hours of content overall, a steal when its price is less than a tenner on either side of the pond.

I unfortunately did not get the chance to try out the game’s co-operative options, but as a single player experience, I never found myself disadvantaged and admittedly a few of those precision platforming segments may have been trickier with another player in the mix.

Gentle Nudges

A small but very welcome feature that has been implemented here is the hint system, which prioritises player agency while still offering clarity. Your hint bar will build up the longer you are stuck on a section, and when used, the game will give you direct outlines of the next few steps of a puzzle.

What it doesn’t do is leave that permanently active. You receive a couple of next steps and then are allowed to carry on with your own gameplay while the bar recharges, effectively a way to gently nudge a player in the right direction without spoiling an entire solution.

As someone prone to sometimes forgetting a blindingly obvious answer at times, these nudges were really appreciated in terms of letting me figure things out for myself, with just the mildest help for when my brain decided to not function.

Visually Arresting

The most immediately appealing aspect of MONOWAVE is its unique visual style. With stark black backgrounds contrasting against brightly coloured characters and levels that evokes a bit of a chalkboard style, except turned up to eleven with a brilliant neon glow.

The character designs themselves are the right side of cute with the level themes also benefitting from the visual style, as mundane biome concepts such as jungles and volcanoes get a new lease of life.

Combined with a soundtrack that is varied and fitting for each of the world’s core emotions, the presentation is instantly appealing across the board, minus a few UI hiccups I hope will be fixed around launch.

Short and Sweet

All of this is tied together within the game’s relatively slight, but sweet and unintrusive narrative. Mono’s quest is told through basic cutscenes between each world without any dialogue.

These cutscenes look nice within the art style but only combine to roughly two minutes of a 6-8 hour game. There is the slightly strange decision to include much more in-depth explanations of the narrative within the game’s menus, but ultimately MONOWAVE’s story is very much unintrusive set dressing.

There are some sweet musings on our human emotions and feelings within the story, but for anyone expecting a fully realised narrative, you will likely be a little disappointed. Regardless it is hardly the title’s main aim and is never a negative in the moment-to-moment gameplay.

Bright and Beautiful

I should also take the time to recommend MONOWAVE as an ideal game for smaller screens. Playing on my OLED laptop it really does visually pop in all the best ways and I really could see this being the perfect handheld game, with it coming to Nintendo Switch and Steam at launch, and Xbox and PlayStation launching further down the line in 2026.

I haven’t heard any news regarding Play Anywhere support, but this would a great little title for Xbox Ally players alongside any Steam Deck or Switch owners. Performance is also consistently solid at 60fps, although a few busier levels saw some frame drops, but this is overall a polished package that should scale well to more modest devices.

Core Memories

Playing MONOWAVE in so many ways reminded me of the golden age of these types of platformers. Seemingly every year having a handful of excellent indie titles with unique concepts and art styles that managed to break out and find an audience.

In today’s far faster moving market it feels a lot harder to have those moments, and playing through MONOWAVE ended up being genuinely nostalgic for a very different time. While not perfect, it is a beautifully creative debut full of fresh ideas and gorgeous visuals, and it is a fantastic package for any puzzle platformer fan out there.

Monowave

Played on PC

PROS

• Gorgeous visuals and art style, especially on smaller screens
• Tight platforming and well-paced core levels
• Genuinely smart core mechanic that feels fully explored in game
• 10+ hours of gameplay for completionists at a budget price point

CONS

• Some small difficulty spikes and uneven checkpoints may frustrate

8.5 out of 10 GREAT DayOne Scoring Policy Buy on Steam Buy on Nintendo eShop