One thing that can make covering indie games a bit frustrating is riding the roller coaster of discovering what new games are about, and how well they may realize their basic vision. I always appreciate games that dare to feature new or different ideas, and there’s real value in that when the space is so dominated by repetition, but a solid idea isn’t enough. Plenty of titles with a strong foundation have managed to build only meager experiences, regardless of their potential, by failing to execute in other key areas like the game’s controls, stage designs, or just general level of quality.

For me Monowave falls into this sort of trap, having a basic idea that’s smart enough, mixing together platforming with what I’d call different skills that vary by your mood. So as you move through a stage your challenge will be to understand not just what you need to do to proceed, but also to understand how you’ll acquire the specific skills you need to accomplish your goals. That ends up being the crux of what Monowave has to offer, and depending on whether you find that interesting, or to slowly fall into a lot of repetition, will be in the eyes of the specific person playing it.

Yes, there’s an element here that can be clever, and the fact that how you interact with a variety of other creatures in very different ways, with different rules, does at least help keep it from getting too repetitive too quickly. That said, its visual clues that are meant to convey how some interactions are meant to work aren’t always terribly clear, though again how easily they can be understood will also vary between players. The good thing is that I’ve played games where what you’re meant to do in specific situations is even more poorly conveyed, but there are obviously games that did it more effortlessly than this does. Throw in what feels like slightly slow and floaty movement compared to many other platformers out there, and the result is a game with reasonably fresh ideas that just doesn’t feel like it was all executed as well as it could have been.