I always appreciate when you can interact with a video game world in unique ways, instead of just stomping on enemies or smashing stuff. We are more evolved than these base actions in 2026, be they in life or gaming. Especially when playing something more thoughtful like a puzzle platformer, more ways to interact with the enemies or hazards blocking your path means more to think about. MONOWAVE is a game that absolutely requires thinking when interacting with its stages, and is an emotionally charged adventure that really kept me engaged.
In this world of colourful lines you play as Mono, a guardian spirit that’s in charge of keeping the four emotions safe. You immediately fail this task of course, and emotion shards go flying across the land infecting creatures with their powers. Now you’re tasked with collecting them, which means surviving angry crocodiles and crying monkeys in the process. It’s a simple story but it works well for the concept of the game, and gets you into this puzzling world.
When Mono isn’t feeling an emotion they’re a pretty basic platforming character, only able to move and jump. Emotions can be granted by touching various colour coded plants though, and these give you different movement abilities. When you’re feeling the yellow joy you can jump higher, allowing you to reach higher platforms. Red rage makes you so angry you can bounce up walls, which is just a more stroppy wall jump. When you’re sad and blue you can melt on command, allowing you to slide through small gaps and openings. Finally green fear makes you more cautious, and this allows you to walk on spikes without taking damage. It’s a cute way to grant you different abilities, and they’re also thematic.
You’re not the only one who can feel the emotions though, all the creatures of the land can. Just like you creatures act differently when they’re feeling different emotions, and this is where the puzzle solving comes in. At first dealing with an angry crocodile is an issue, but if you make him scared he’ll fling you upwards helping you get somewhere out of reach. An angry lizard’s fire can be used to break walls, but a joyous one will help you cross large gaps by happily shooting you out of its mouth. Experimenting with animals and their emotions will help you progress through the game, and is just fun regardless.
If you’ve ever wondered how you make a crocodile happy or a lizard sad though it’s actually very simple, you just whistle at them. Any time Mono has an emotion they can whistle a tune to pass it to a creature, but they’ll also lose it themselves. This means a lot of stages are spent dashing back and forth to pass emotions to different animals, and working out the perfect solution to a platforming puzzle.
I must admit that it didn’t take many levels for me to start getting stuck, and I was grateful that MONOWAVE accounted for my slower brain on those occasions. At any time you can press the hint button and a marker will tell you what you need to interact with next, providing a helpful nudge in the right direction. If you’re still struggling you can just bash the button repeatedly and follow the exact path to the end of the stage, and the game never shames you for this. It often took a few hints to get me back on track after breaks from the game, so I was rather glad to have them.
For those wanting a challenge instead of hints though, MONOWAVE has plenty of this to go around. Alongside completing levels there are hard to reach collectibles hiding in each stage, which take some serious out of the box thinking to reach. There are also hidden exits in some stages that lead to extremely hard bonus stages, which are a real test of your platforming and problem solving skills. Doing all this extra hard work will reward you with cool new skins for Mono too, which you can proudly wear as you save the world from emotional turmoil.
MONOWAVE is an interesting puzzle game that really makes you think, but the platforming can sometimes get in the way of that. So many stages feature really awkward jumps where you’ll have to dodge obstacles, or even worse emotion plants. Accidentally touching a plant and having to run back to fetch the right emotion can get old fast in some stages, and makes the puzzling feel more frustrating in turn. Even with the different difficulty options I just found the platforming expected too much of the player, especially when it’s not really the focus of the game for the most part.
MONOWAVE is an emotional rollercoaster of a game, that’ll make you feel a lot of the joy and a little of the anger that the main character does. The emotion based puzzles are seriously clever, encouraging you to play around in the world as well as using your noggin. The platforming does sometimes feel a little more frustrating than I’d like, but with the help of some hints I kept my emotions in check and enjoyed the whole damn thing.
