From the lens of an industry competitor, it is usually in your best interest to create something with as broad appeal as possible. The more people you appeal to, the more people that will buy your product. This is as true for video games as any other industry, especially with developers in the AAA space: often leaning on well-established IPs and gameplay formulas to sell customers on their game. However, equal importance is also placed on standing out, because pure sycophancy to current trends or standards means you are exactly like the others, devolving marketing into “who has the most money,” rather than “who has the most compelling product.” We’ve seen what happens when you stretch a mile wide and an inch thin, but what happens in the inverse case: A game with such narrow appeal that it only resonates with a select few? Enter today’s game, Monospaced Lovers, a game mixing 2D platforming with puzzle solving and bullet hell boss fights.
Monospaced Lovers was developed and published by Stefan Bhagwandin of Scarlet String Studios (alongside artistic contributions from other artists) and released in October 2024, with indie publisher Astrolabe Games handling the Switch and PS5 ports. Apart from standard information that is typical with my reviews, it’s hard to find introductory words broad enough to sum up my experience playing Monospaced Lovers. Its very existence is the definition of niche: an obscure indie title buried in the deepest corners of the Playstation Store, built specifically for the smallest subset of people. However, beyond the depths of its obscurity lies a uniquely captivating experience packed with plenty of meaningful content for those who vibe with what it’s going for.
Note: Any specific examples discussed for story or gameplay will not go any further than what is available in the playable demo.
Story
You play as Clara, an unassuming young woman who wakes up one day to a phone that isn’t hers, mysteriously swapped with a stranger only known as “Kam” from far, far away. Further, this phone is littered with encrypted messages, only accessible via collectible data chips scattered throughout the world. With a mysterious hacker known only as the God of Binary claiming these messages as key to saving this world, you descend into a rabbit hole of mysteries, secrets, and philosophical ruminations as you explore every facet of said world. With the help of her friends and this new acquaintance she can only communicate with via texts, she may be able to solve the mystery, learn more about herself, and answer the important question: “What exists in the space between 0 and 1?”
With the normalization of the digital era, speculation from professionals and onlookers alike have concluded that texting is a dilution of human connection, that it can’t replace the value of physical proximity. While the argument is not without substance, it begs the question: is there any strength in a connection that is purely virtual? By all accounts, it shouldn’t. Your only connection to an individual is words on a screen, words that lose tone, expression, and body language, all of which are subtle but necessary nuances in communicating. However, after playing through Monospaced Lovers, I’ve come around on it, albeit not in the ways you’d expect. The slow blossoming of this relationship is heartfelt and believable, and in many ways, this digital dynamic intertwines with the story to great effect. Despite knowing literally nothing about Kam and being a seemingly infinite distance away, we also know next to nothing about Clara apart from her name, and Kam is on the same boat. In a sense, we are no less an outsider than he is, and that mystique is what draws me into these characters and makes their interactions organic.
While it is entirely communicated through text, the game takes advantage of this to make a compelling story.
The distance between these two goes beyond physical proximity. Of course, what Clara and Kam say to each other is no less important to the development of their relationship, though it’s also worth considering what isn’t said. The instinctual typing of one message, only for your conscious mind to instantly delete it. From Clara’s perspective, it’s both a brief glimpse in her mind and a realization that Kam is likely doing the same thing. While their character traits remain evident throughout the game, they are still performing on the screen to some extent, making it all too easy to withhold information from one another.
All of this leads back to the beginning question: “What exists in the space between 0 and 1?” What appears to be a simple mathematical question is surprisingly fertile ground for metaphor. Two absolutes, 0 and 1, with a definitive midpoint, 0.5, are all that is certain, yet what lies in the space between exceeds what the imagination can make up. You could break that distance down into tenths, hundredths, even thousandths, yet there is always a smaller denomination. In the game’s context, this space is the distance between Clara and Kam. While they may have picked up on small things about each other, they hardly know any baseline information about each other: no names, no locations, no faces, no history, no nothing, all punctuated by the fragility of their connection. If one phone dies, it’s severed with no backup to speak of. Progressing the story with this in mind is what makes their relationship so compelling, especially when the undercurrent threatens to sever it. The game effectively handles the implications of this technology in a social context to create a story that’s wholly unique.
Presentation
The metaphor of 0 and 1 also carries into the game’s presentation as well. The art style appears to mesh cel-shaded character designs with water color backgrounds, and the soundtrack’s instrumentation goes between acoustic instruments like guitars and pianos to digital synthesizers and chiptunes. Of course, you could easily interpret this as a stylistic choice owing to the blend between the analog and the digital, and it would be just as valid. However, in the context of the metaphor, they are two absolutes with a large distance between each other. There’s a clear distinction between the characters in the foreground and the hand-painted backgrounds, and it evokes fond memories of the amateurish visual choices I would make when I poked around Scratch.
When I say these things, I absolutely mean them as compliments. Setting aside the pretentious metaphors for a second, the game is pretty, and the aesthetic direction is memorable. The distinction between the foreground characters and background art provides remarkable visual clarity, which is especially useful when the game demands my full attention. There were never any moments throughout my 60+ hour ventures of precision platforming where I didn’t know exactly where I was relative to the obstacles in front of me, whether they be platforms or bullets, nor where I needed to be. In a genre primarily about finding a path in hedge mazes of death, that is not an easy task.
Gameplay
Monospaced Lovers is a platformer at heart, but the actual type of platformer is a little muddier. While it could be defined as a “loose” metroidvania, the core gameplay pillars and systems don’t support that foundation. There is an interconnected world, and you do acquire items that aid in exploring that world, but the items aren’t so much a traversal upgrade as they are a facilitator for the game’s many puzzles. The closest comparison I can make in the gameplay department would be that of La-Mulana, a puzzle platformer that garnered infamy for its cryptic riddles. While Monospaced Lovers is thankfully not as cryptic as its inspirations (at least not in the main game), the game intentionally evokes some of the feelings their predecessor did. In La-Mulana, the game featured a massive, open-ended temple for you to explore, solve puzzles and defeat bosses.
However, the actual goals and order of progression were intentionally left vague, and solutions to puzzles were often found in other areas of the map. As such, players would often wander around desperately attempting to find any leads, often before stumbling into the solution. On the contrary, Monospaced Lovers’ puzzles are mostly self-contained, thankfully, and even when they are not, the game is usually fair about what may be relevant if the player is diligent about interacting with other characters. That being said, there will be moments in which you won’t really know what to do next and wander around a bit before stumbling into the path forward, mostly due to its plethora of optional content and vague nature. Unless you know exactly what you’re doing (either by watching a guide or having played it before), you will need to adopt a different mindset going into this game, because getting lost will jarringly slow the pace down. The game emphasizes its exploration element as part of the experience, and if that’s not something you vibe with, this game will most likely push you away.
The exploration itself doesn’t seem that impressive starting out. It initially seems quite linear, with the opening areas appearing as glorified corridors. Perhaps there’s an odd collectible here and there, but most of them are relatively easy to find if you pay attention. Then you venture into the sewers, and that’s when it hits you: this game is DENSE. The world is a multi-layered ball of yarn, littered with challenges, collectibles, and other small side quests, and untangling it can feel overwhelming, especially if you are a completionist. However, digging into this content unearths a plethora of challenges and interactions worth finding. As a matter of fact, the game does quite well in rewarding your curiosity. I was surprised by how much the game would respond to certain situations, such as attempting to break an immovable boulder by repeatedly dashing into it, or inputting a joke solution to a puzzle mentioned by Clara or Kam in a previous conversation. Sometimes, the game would give me an amusing follow-up conversation, or it would even reward me with collectibles or other surprises.
Furthermore, the game does really well to hint at future challenges or puzzles when you currently lack the required items. Something in the level design, like a probable dead end or a weird visual anomaly piques your attention before you discover what they are meant for later on. This drip feed of questions in the back of your head makes these areas quite rewarding to explore with your fancy tools and a fresh set of eyes. Of course, most of these things provide little in the way beyond collectibles and optional content, but reinforcement of a player’s actions, no matter how little, are what makes it fun to be curious here, even when I get stuck on the game’s main content.
Speaking of which, a good portion of the game’s story, collectibles, and secrets consists of puzzles in some capacity. The puzzles in the main game, while mostly fair in the hints they provide, do require some external knowledge to avoid getting stuck. In the beginning of the game, this takes shape as binary number puzzles. The in-game hints explaining how it works is fairly well done and could likely be solved by most people, even those with no experience on the topic. Later in the game, however, there is a string of puzzles that will completely stump a player if they don’t possess the prerequisite knowledge. While I didn’t have many problems with these puzzles, I was also proficient in these topics long before I played the game, so the hints made sense to me. I probably couldn’t say the same for other players, and it’s likely the most limiting factor for player retention.
It is unfortunate too, because a lot of the game’s puzzles can also be quite clever, both in and out of the main story. In certain instances, the tools I thought were delegated to one type of puzzle, each ended up being usable in more than one way, and this led to particularly satisfying revelations. For the most spoiler-free example, a slime I was interacting with spoke what appeared to be absolute gibberish unless I was using the game’s translator item to interpret their speech. However, I dug a bit deeper and realized that the speech wasn’t gibberish at all, but rather an encoded Caesar cipher, which I could theoretically use to understand other creatures, or even to solve a cipher that isn’t automatically translated for you. Of course, this wasn’t the only revelation, but it goes to show how much thought was put into these seemingly arbitrary tools and how they interacted with the world and puzzles. You still need to have the knowledge of these topics to fully appreciate them, and you may have to conduct some external research to learn about it. While learning these things may be a rewarding experience in of itself, it may also just be frustrating. Your mileage with this may vary.
The platforming itself, whilst a bit floaty, is appropriately snappy and responsive. Clara has plenty of drag and mid-air control, as well as being able to walk to slow down her movement speed. While the floatiness initially appears as a hindrance, it’s actually a blessing, since the slower descent allows for much finer adjustments mid-air. This level of control is practically mandatory with what the game throws at you, and this goes for both its platforming and its bosses. For the former, the game will frequently thrust you into precision-platforming challenges that you would find in games like Celeste and I Wanna Be the Guy, excluding the trolls that made up the identity of the latter. While the most difficult platforming segments are mostly reserved as optional challenges for collectibles, some of the main game platforming can be difficult if you are unaccustomed to the genre. Some of the platforming gimmicks, whilst mostly reserved as optional challenges, still lean on the more annoying side, as they often like to toy with visibility as part of its challenge. Most of these challenges do have fun or clever means of circumventing the issue and are presented in restricted quantities to avoid frustration, but it can be slightly grating when one of the puzzles has me blindly scratching around a maze like Velma from Scooby Doo searching for her glasses.
That said, even when things got hard, the controls were precise enough to where I never blamed them for my failures, and this is especially important during the boss fights, where precision is mandatory.
If you have ever played the 2D bullet hell platformer Rabi-Ribi, then you probably have a good idea of what to expect from this game’s boss fights. They can be broken up into two types of phases: “Attacks” and “Movements,” both of which progress when you dash into them. During each attack, the boss is usually vulnerable from the get go, but often surround themselves with bullets or other projectiles to make them harder to hit. It is possible to run up and hit it right as the fight starts, but doing so without taking damage is a difficult prospect. Movements, on the other hand, are a little more complicated. On top of being the only phase in which you can actually deal damage to the boss, they require you to survive more challenging patterns before they become vulnerable. Even when they become vulnerable, you still have to hit them while they are still shooting, and unlike regular attacks, openings here are far tighter.
There’s a nice ebb and flow to be found once you get to grips with their attacks. Each movement is broken up by a lighter attack that keeps the pressure up, but still allows you a moment to breathe. Further, if you are struggling, the game allows you to freely practice any individual phases you have reached during a real fight. As such, the learning process was smooth, leaving the entirety of the challenge down to remaining steady and threading the needle through hundreds of bullets, as it should be.
To say that Monospaced Lovers is a niche game would be an understatement. Its kaleidoscope of niche gameplay ideas and philosophy are so overwhelming that it would easily push away the few players who hear of it, even with accessibility options available. It may appear schizophrenic, and it certainly could have been, but it’s surprisingly coherent. Each gameplay pillar is notably distinct, but there’s careful consideration put into how they cross-pollinate. They all congregate into something that appeals to those who enjoy taking these challenges to a logical extreme, and that’s why it drew me in.
Of all the games in the market that try putting their finger in the same pie, or in numerous pies at once, Monospaced Lovers emerges with its own pie. It’s an acquired mix of tangy and sweet, and the crust is a bit uneven, but I could not get the taste out of my mind since I first bit into it. It’s almost as if it were a pie made specifically for me, even though there are many other people like me who also love this pie. With the level of proficiency shown in the craft of the pie, the baker could have easily made a standard pie with equal success. However, he chose to make his own pie and waive the consequences. By abandoning what makes a game like this conventionally appealing (consider Uncharted as loosely related), Monospaced Lovers’ unique taste makes it worth experiencing on its own, even if you don’t end up liking it. If you do appreciate the taste of what the game is going for, then it becomes all the more endearing, because it plays heavily into its strengths with great success.
Trophy Hunting
Monospaced Lovers is designed to be dense and challenging, and no better representation of that fact exists than in its trophy list. Fully completing the game is a dense ball of yarn, with so many challenges and puzzles to untangle that it’s difficult to summarize without breaking it down into a schizophrenic itemized list. If I were to break completion down into beating the game, unlocking some miscellaneous trophies, and flawlessly clearing bosses on the Hard difficulty, I would be omitting the many collectibles that are tied to secrets and puzzles with borderline La-Mulana levels of obscurity, a highly missable trophy that requires a whole new game with significant completion progress if you mess it up, and even an entire minigame about surviving hellstorms of bullets for 72 seconds straight. Did I also mention that each boss has a bonus challenge with an even harder attack that you have to survive without taking damage for more trophies?
Confused? Good.
While the platinum trophy is a lot to wrap your head around, the biggest saving grace is that 99% of it can not be missed, meaning you can tackle it in any order you like once it is accessible. It is a schizophrenic itemized list, but it is still effectively a shopping list of collectibles and tasks to accomplish. Despite the smaller world size, the game has over 60 collectibles for you to find, many of which are tied to a puzzle, platforming challenge, or secret. These collectibles will put you through the game’s most cryptic secrets and challenging level designs.
On top of the many collectibles required for completion, Monospaced Lovers requires you to complete 5 bullet hell boss fights on the Hard difficulty, 4 of which must be completed flawlessly. While the 4 fights requiring no-damage clears aren’t extraordinarily difficult, they do require you to rethink how you traverse patterns in a bullet hell since you are controlling a platforming character. Once you accompany yourself to Clara’s hitbox and how you can maneuver with it, the patterns are quite doable to complete flawlessly, which is good considering how Hard mode works. On top of reducing the number of hit points you have, it also changes how a certain attack phase works. As mentioned previously, boss fights consist of two types of phases, “Attacks” and “Movements.” The latter is the actual attack where you must survive a persistent pattern of bullets before the boss becomes vulnerable for you to deal damage, whereas the attacks are a short phase that lead into the movements. Playing on Easy difficulty, taking damage affects nothing and allows you to progress as normal. Crank it up to Hard, however, and any damage taken during a movement will revert you back to the previous attack phase, which can break concentration and spiral into a loss.
When put in the context of most bosses, this isn’t a problem. You are expected to clear them flawlessly anyway, and you are allowed to practice any attack or movement if you reach it at least once during a fight. Where this mechanic becomes a problem is the final boss. While you are only required to clear their Hard fight and EX challenge, their patterns are easily among the hardest in the game to survive. If you were pondering the bullet hell nature of this game, this boss puts those doubts to rest. Each phase covers the screen much more than what the previous bosses ever hoped to fill, and you are expected to flawlessly platform through all of it.
Even if you survive the boss on Hard mode, that isn’t even the end, as the EX attack spans 6 additional patterns for you to needle through. Unlike other EX challenges, you are not required to survive everything in one attempt. Checkpoints are provided after each attack, but you are still required to clear each one in a single sitting without getting hit to complete the challenge. Even if you have experience in the genre, platforming through these patterns is ridiculously difficult, requiring the most precision across all challenges in the whole game despite their brevity.
For the sake of spoilers, I won’t link any late-game content, but you can find a video showing the first boss below for a taste of what this game has to offer.
Fantasy – Flawless Clear [Hard]
