Moncage

“Moncage” by Dong Zhou & Yijia Chen.

“[An] adventure puzzle game, where the player will explore a secluded island and an abandoned factory trapped in a mysterious cubic device. Each face of this cubic device will display a different scene. The player will navigate through the island and the factory by finding the connections among the scenes.”


The demo of the puzzle game “Moncage” features one of the most promising concepts I have seen in a while. At start, you are presented a cube, which sides all seem to be transparent. Inside, you can see a little camera. As soon as you rotate the cube, you will see one side full with drawers. In one of the drawers, a case waits to be opened by you. Its content are mostly books and toys like a teddy bear and a small van model. At the same time a light glows strongly from the right: Another side reveals its world to you.

This time, the side shows some kind of factory area with a transporter, which just stands right at its place. When you rotate the cube in such a way, that the toy van and the transporter overlap with each other, the transporter comes to life and will drive its cargo up to the broken bridge. Now your task is to find a way to repair the bridge and thereby to discover all the different small places that the “Moncage” cube hides!

Each new world will give you a new riddle to solve, so that you will have to observe each room carefully. The puzzles are designed in a nearly perfect way, because some of them might be pretty difficult, but each solution is logically comprehensible and if you find it yourself, then you sure will be happy about it. Do not worry too much if you get stuck, though, as you can simply press the spacebar and the important items get highlighted.

All those tiny worlds are hold together by a story which gets told without any words, but with hidden photographs. “Moncage” is still a demo, so it is not entirely clear what the game will be about; however, I would suspect that it tells a story about the relationship between a father and his son as well as how both of them are linked to the factory. I cannot wait to see if I was right or wrong.