We don’t always understand how our emotions can affect those around us. When we’re in a bad mood, we tend to keep things very insular: it’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to. But the energy and behavior we exhibit when we’re going through all the colors of the emotional rainbow – happy, sad, anxious, upset – those cast hues upon other people and things we see throughout the day. Someone’s upbeat attitude can help lift my own dampened spirits. A person storming through a day can really sour what was an alright mood. There’s psychology behind it all that I’m wildly underqualified to talk about, but it’s the backbone theme of Monowave, a new puzzle platformer from Studio BB. Like it or not, there’s a good chance that what we’re feeling as we go out into the world isn’t just our own atmosphere: it’s everyone’s.

Set in a world where spoken dialogue is non-existent, you play a little being named Mono, who is a guardian spirit destined to protect the four Emotions of Happiness, Sorrow, Anxiety and Anger. Mono immediately fails his job when the prismatic shards of these emotions break free and scatter across the land, throwing everything into chaos and slowly ebbing the life out of the Prism Tree, because of course there’s a tree. Mono now will go on a journey to restore the Emotion Shards back to their rightful place, which will not be easy. Emotion is now in flux, and Mono must harness and channel these four powerful feelings to set things right. However, there’s a good chance Mono and the player will learn about the importance of each emotion’s station and how the static state can’t always stay. You watched Inside Out, right? You get the picture.

As a puzzle platformer, Monowave relies on the aforementioned emotions as both triggers and barriers to unlocking where you can go next. Mono’s movement skillset changes depending on the emotion he taps into when he discovers a glowing flower of feeling. Happiness lets him jump higher, sadness lets him slink low and even squeeze into tiny spots, anger means bouncing off the walls and anxiety makes him impervious to trap damage. That last one only sort of makes sense but it’s also one of the most invaluable abilities throughout the entire game. Mono is able to sing in a tone that matches the current emotion he’s feeling, which then can be spread to whichever NPCs happen to be in the area. Mono will lose that emotion, but the NPCs will gain it and change their behavior.

The change in behavior is the wildcard element of the entire game. A chameleon that spits fire when angry (good for destroying branches) will spit water when sad (good for putting out fires), and so on. This seems to check out, but others get more granular. There’s these massive dudes who will beat their fists when angry, destroying anything in an immediate radius, but won’t move. When they’re afflicted with anxiety, they’ll start running in one direction, stopping when they hit a wall or other barrier. If you make them happy, they chuckle at some unknown joke and then fling you into the air if you happen to be nearby. Each revealed emotional reaction is catalogued in the menu codex, so you can easily check if you forget which triggers might be most beneficial to your current plight.

Structurally, Monowave progresses and evolves in a smooth but steep fashion. After the first couple of stages, you need to chain together a lot of different emotional transitions in order to succeed. Understanding how birds and butterflies can act as helpers and spread emotions on their own is great for the first world, but that doesn’t help you when they’re nowhere to be found once you leave the forest. Realizing there’s a lot of routine work that goes into success – cycling through the same emotions many times in a single interaction – can actually make the “emotional” work more methodical and scientific, like you’re crafting an assembly line of feelings to make something happen. In spite of the cute aesthetics and simplified design, there’s a degree of complexity that will really set you back on your heels if you think you can simply rush forward.

Which…you kind of can. No shade to players out there who like a challenge, but once you throw on Support mode and become invulnerable, you can absolutely buffalo your way forward through the most layered stages of discovery. If you also decide you don’t care about collecting the extra tidbits in each stage (which I definitely wanted to unlock additional hats for Mono), it’s possible to disregard most things and just charge forward, reason and logic be damned. You know how Homer got himself out of the corn maze with the help of a chainsaw? Support mode is your chainsaw, and, while it doesn’t make the game a total cakewalk, it does lighten the load a lot when you’re not patient enough to test out every combination of emotions to go onto the next stage.

However, that doesn’t make it linear by any stretch of the imagination. Quite a few times, you’ll be moving along and looping back to parts and locations within a stage that you couldn’t reach before, and may not have even visually clocked, which is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, realizing that the area is more expansive than you could have initially known is interesting in an explorative sense, enhancing the feeling of a fleshed out game. On the other hand, you can easily be teleported somewhere to move forward, only to make a simple misstep in the name of inquiry and then fall down/up to where you just were several screens ago, forcing you to potentially redo a long series of steps to get back to where you were. This happened…a couple of times.

Monowave also has a bit of a tightness issue, which could be offputting for some players. Like I mentioned, the minimalist approach to how the levels and beings present is a double edged sword. On the one hand, you can really drill down on specific details that happen and footing placement for success. In that same vein, it’s sometimes a real challenge to get the correct angle for an angry wall bounce to reach a small platform, or get just the right height to clear an emotion blossom and avoid swapping from happy to sad at an inopportune time. The adorable, loopy nature of everything disguises how much you’re really going to need to practice in order to nail some jumps. It also frustrates you to realize that the chameleon will spit you just high enough to not clip something, so you could have been doing that this whole time.

There is a two player mode for Monowave, with a second player taking control of a sentient prism shard who can seriously assist Mono in his quest. The shard can fly anywhere on the visible map, picking up emotions and dispensing them with ease and access that makes Mono’s way forward that much better. Not to mention being able to pick up MacGuffins that are otherwise an actual challenge if you have to obey the laws of gravity! It’s a great second player mode, but, please, for the love of everything, make sure your copilot knows what they’re doing. My dear daughter kept infecting everything and everyone with anger, causing Papa to get stomped into the ground no matter what I did. Now we’re all in anger management classes, so I guess the game worked?

There are boss battles within the game that lead to secondary abilities, but, for the most part, these are just additional storybeats with a level of comprehension to them. There isn’t a thing that you pick up in the aftermath that is needed to succeed: anxiety’s ability to vanish and avoid getting hit can be good with timing for different emotional turnstiles, but being able to jump and run is also quite effective, and doesn’t rely on you having the right emotion coded at a given time. The battles, though, do help add to the nonverbal narrative, letting the player experience a bit of the inner workings that not only afflicted the boss itself, but the general tone of the world at large. Given that even written information is scarce, Monowave does a tremendous amount of explanation through pantomime and pictographs.

Monowave stayed on my radar for years through two simple moves: persistence and appeal. There was never a time where I didn’t think about this game with fondness, and there wasn’t a spot where I simply gave up and walked away. It’s an inventive, methodic, and calculated game wearing the banner of cute and simple. You’ll marvel at the way these four components unlock a bonanza of actions and reactions, and the satisfaction of getting it all just right cannot be paralleled. From the shift in soundtrack as you adapt your emotional state to the visual shifts in characters as they cycle through their feelings, the details are what show you the love and care that’s been invested in Mono’s journey. An instant hook for puzzle platform enthusiasts, Monowave satiates and keeps you coming back for more. The strongest emotion, as it turns out, is joy.

Monowave is available now on PC, Switch and Switch 2.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2.

A copy of Monowave was provided by the publisher.