Monument Valley 3 review – the best new video game on Netflix
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The Christmas special for video games on Netflix is a new sequel to mobile classic Monument Valley and it’s just as beautiful and mesmerising as ever. Netflix was originally in the business of posting rented DVDs to their customers, replacing an arduous journey to Blockbuster Video with a leisurely stroll to your local postbox. It was the later pivot to streaming video that proved to be their masterstroke, annihilating competitors and inspiring a dreadful new generation of streaming services from seemingly absolutely everybody, so that now you have to spend a small fortune on subscriptions to be allowed to watch everything.
![[Monument Valley 3 screenshot]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/SEI_233358542-82b3.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
As a way of holding onto customers who might otherwise switch to Disney+, Amazon Prime, Paramount+, or any of the plethora of smaller offerings, Netflix started adding video games to its offering. When Google briefly flirted with games, a fundamental misunderstanding of development cycles meant their grandiose plans failed to pay off as quickly as anticipated, leading Google Stadia into the same graveyard as so many other abandoned Alphabet projects.
The Netflix approach has been different. Rather than starting from scratch, with a scattering of partners, they applied the philosophy that worked so well in TV and film, by licensing games from existing developers en masse. Instead of chasing triple-A titles they instead went after mobile, and rather than settling for any old rubbish studios had knocking about, their focus has been on quality; and thanks to private equity financing, that wasn’t at the expense of quantity.
