Monument Valley 3 breaks free from Netflix on July 22
Monument Valley 3 is considered a solid entry in the franchise, with plenty of fresh puzzles that play with perspective. You navigate a character through bizarre mazes and strangely-designed levels. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so.
These games are partially inspired by artists like M.C. Escher, as the pathways don't necessarily follow the laws of physics. It's a whole lot of fun, and sort of plays like a more psychedelic version of the Switch exclusive Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker .
The third entry in the franchise brings in a new gameplay mechanic in the form of a sailboat that freely moves between sections. The vibes are top-tier, with gorgeous art and a great ambient soundtrack. We don't have a price yet, as Monument Valley 3 was free with a Netflix subscription, but Monument Valley 2 ranged from $5 to $8 depending on the platform. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so.
This news comes from today's Wholesome Direct livestream, which happens during Summer Game Fest. The announcements are coming in fast and hot from SGF, so stay on top of things right here.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Los Angeles Times
25 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
‘Monsters' discourse eluded Netflix's ‘talking points.' To Chloë Sevigny, that's art in action
Over the course of her three-decade career, Chloë Sevigny has built an eclectic résumé playing complex women whom she describes as 'the moral compass' or 'the salt of the earth' in a story. But in the second season of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's 'Monsters,' which reexamines the story of the Menendez family for a new generation, Sevigny plays the role of victim and villain in equal measure. An unflinching exploration of abuse and privilege, the Netflix limited series reconsiders the lives of Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) and Erik Menendez (Cooper Koch), who were convicted in the 1989 killing of their wealthy parents, José (Javier Bardem) and Mary Louise a.k.a. Kitty (Sevigny). 'The most challenging part was that each episode was a different person's idea of her, so I had to switch gears as to who I think she was to serve the way that they were telling the story,' Sevigny says. 'I've never had to do that before, and as an actor, you want to find the truth of the character, and then there was, of course, not one singular truth to her. And plus, nobody really knows what happens.' After working together on two seasons of 'American Horror Story' and then 'Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,' Sevigny received a call from Murphy, who felt strongly that she should play the mysterious Menendez matriarch. 'From the very get-go, he pitched me having this opus kind of episode, where I get to really examine alcoholism and abuse and a lot of complicated issues that people don't necessarily like to face,' Sevigny says of the sixth episode, which chronicles José and Kitty's relationship against the backdrop of family therapy sessions. 'I think that's not how we justify doing these kinds of [true-crime stories], but we hope that they can give someone the courage to speak out if they are in a position where they're being mistreated.' As one of New York's 'It' girls of the '90s, Sevigny barely spent any time at home watching television, but she still remembers seeing photographs of the Menendez brothers during their murder trials on the front pages of newsstands. In preparation for the part, Sevigny revisited the era. She read writer Dominick Dunne's buzzy Vanity Fair stories about the trials. She read a few books about Kitty's upbringing, which revealed her history of self-medicating. She even watched the brothers' trial testimony, in which they alleged that José had sexually abused them as children. At a Vanity Fair party, Sevigny met a director whose wife had been close friends with Kitty and claimed that Kitty had genuinely loved her children. But while 'Monsters' offers a brief glimpse of maternal love at the very end, the series as a whole takes a decidedly different approach. 'There were aspects of the character that I tried to lean into that I thought, 'Oh, you don't often see a mother complain about her children in the way that she does, like, 'I hate my kids. They ruined my life.'' There are certain things that you never, or rarely, see on TV,' Sevigny says. What was more difficult for her to wrap her head around was the thought of a mother who is willfully blind to child abuse: 'What kind of person does that, and how do you access that kind of emotion, or the strength, for lack of a better word, or the cowardice to behave in that way in those certain situations? 'The series is also an examination of the cycles of abuse and how hard it is for people to break out of those cycles,' adds Sevigny, who found it easy to act frightened when confronted with Bardem's high intensity. 'She had been abused, and her mother had been abused by her father. Her mother left her father, and she was raised without a dad. I think that can often be a reason for women to stay with their husbands because they think, 'Oh, maybe just having a father around outweighs the abuse,' which is not true, obviously.' 'Monsters' has not been without controversy, however. Last September, Erik publicly criticized the series for its inaccuracies and for implying an incestuous relationship between him and Lyle. (Erik has formed a bond with Koch, with whom he has remained in touch, and Lyle has since commended the series for helping viewers understand the long-term effects of child abuse.) 'The Netflix team had given us all these talking points, and we were supposed to stay very disengaged [from the brothers] — and Cooper did not listen to them,' Sevigny recalls with a laugh. 'I was like, 'Wow, this young boy, this is his first [big] thing, and he's coming out the gate just speaking his mind.' Being a woman and an actress, and growing up in the '90s, we were all silenced and muzzled in a way, so it's interesting to watch these young people have the agency and advocacy to speak up for themselves.' In May, the brothers were resentenced to 50 years to life in prison, which makes them eligible for parole. Sevigny is no stranger to being part of zeitgeisty shows, having played one of the wives of a polygamous fundamentalist Mormon in HBO's 'Big Love' around the time that Warren Jeffs was convicted of child sexual assault: 'You want to make art, hopefully, that gets people talking and engaged, and I think ['Monsters'] has done that to the umpteenth.' Sevigny found out that she had been nominated for her first Emmy while driving to the airport in Los Angeles, where she has been shooting Peacock's 'The Five-Star Weekend' opposite Jennifer Garner. The actor ultimately sees the show's 11 total nominations as an acknowledgment of Murphy's enduring creative vision. 'I respect all the diverse shows that he makes, and that he hires the same actors, artisans and craftsmen over and over. To validate his choice in me for that part also felt really important, because I think that he sticks his neck out for people a lot,' says Sevigny, who celebrated the achievement with a small Champagne toast during her flight back to New York. 'The kinds of stories that he's trying to tell are often challenging and people shy away from them, and the work that he does is important. And now maybe he'll hire me again!'
Los Angeles Times
25 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
The 5 best TV moments you won't see awarded at this year's Emmys
This year's Emmy Awards, airing Sept. 14 on CBS, are set to shine a spotlight on 25 different categories in the main broadcast. This undertaking could take over three hours. But it would take much, much longer to honor every great scene, performance and quirky coincidence to appear on TV in the last year. There are so many shows and so many ways to be compelled (and sometimes repelled) by their content. And so, cue the trumpets! Here, The Envelope presents its own, deeply subjective awards honoring the greatest moments in television during the 2024-25 season — at least those that won't get their proper recognition at the big show. Welcome to the 2025 Envy Awards! A hidden in-joke in a movie or TV series is one thing; burying two slickly executed Easter eggs from your stars' previous hits takes things to another level. In the Emmy-nominated 'The Gorge' (Apple TV+), Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller play assassins slowly getting to know each other remotely, and spend time sharing their hobbies in a montage that might spark some déjà vu in fans of the actors. First, they're shown playing chess across an abyss — a clear shoutout to Taylor-Joy's Emmy-winning 2020 limited series 'The Queen's Gambit.' Seconds later they're banging makeshift drums at each other — an equally clear nod to Teller's Oscar-winning 2014 film, 'Whiplash.' Coincidence? We think not — this one was executed as smoothly as a hit man's bullet fired into a mutant monster. Who knew guns with hair triggers could be so shockingly lethal in elevators? OK, maybe everyone. But there was tough competition this year in this category. In Apple TV+'s Emmy-nominated 'Severance,' Mark (Adam Scott) holds a gun on Mr. Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) — and then whoops! it discharges when he shifts between outie and innie, killing the menacing supervisor. But in 'Squid Game' (Netflix), No-eul (Park Gyu-young) draws out the tension while crawling toward an overlooked firearm left in an executive elevator — and her final shots save her life. That extended moment of suspense gives her the killing edge in this category. It can be hard to surprise TV audiences these days, but the Emmy-nominated 'Dept. Q' (Netflix) shocked audiences twice in its pilot through clever editing. In the opening moments, a shooter springs upon authorities surveying a crime scene with almost supernatural speed, catching not just the police but also the audience off guard. But the real surprise involves Merritt (Chloe Pirrie), a prickly prosecutor who seems primed to team up with the surly, wounded Det. Morck (Matthew Goode) to solve crimes. But — spoiler alert — Merritt's scenes are actually flashbacks, and she's the series' victim, missing for four years. That's not just a twist in the tale, that's a twist in the whole genre. Nerdy math types multiplied in this year's lineup, though no character exactly fit the stereotypical image of a poindexter. Apple TV+'s 'Prime Target' features Edward (Leo Woodall), a handsome university student who won't look you in the eye but discovers that a head for figures can land you in an international conspiracy — and put your life in danger. Meanwhile, the overlooked-but-fantastic BritBox series 'Shetland' also combined a math genius and an international spy ring with the murder of Annie Bett (Sarah MacGillivray). Both deserve credit for elevating the geek in us all, but 'Shetland' takes the win by showing Bett passing on her numbers know-how to her son, calming him while they're in the middle of a secret nighttime investigation. Blame 'Game of Thrones' (HBO), which took the taboo of incest to highbrow, Emmy-winning TV a few years ago and opened the door to many more WTF moments around the dial. This year, not only did 'Thrones' prequel 'House of the Dragon' continue the theme with an episode where Daemon (Matthew Smith) dreams of having sex with his mom, but the Emmy-winning 'The White Lotus' keeps things in the family as Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) discovers just how much of a people pleaser his younger bro, Lochlan (Sam Nivola), is. FX's 'American Horror Stories' went one icky step further, though, as David (Victor Garber) is turned on by his own clone. The pair round the bases together and bring new meaning to 'self-love.'
Los Angeles Times
25 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Go inside the maze of ‘Adolescence's' most technically complex episode
It's a good thing that 'Adolescence' and 'The Studio' aren't competing head to head for boldly filming every episode as one continuous shot: It'd be like comparing apples to oranges. The Netflix limited series and Apple TV+ half-hour series are both favored to win Creative Arts Emmys for cinematography. But while Apple TV+'s Hollywood satire instills high anxiety, Netflix's psychological crime drama, created by Jack Thorne and star Stephen Graham, which explores misogynist violence and cyberbullying, thrums with dread. The four-episode series finds 13-year-old Jamie (Owen Cooper) arrested for the murder of classmate Katie (Emilia Holliday) and progressively reveals the tragic fallout. The continuous-shot technique, with the lightweight, unconventional Ronin 4D camera, puts us right beside the characters. We're along for the ride, following them and surveying the surroundings with documentary-style realism. 'The camera is an exact mirror of what the characters are going through at any time,' said cinematographer Matthew Lewis. 'And that's really critical to making a one-shot feel like it is part of the language of the show and not a gimmick. For the audience, it acts as a remedy for our terrible attention spans by not cutting.' Director Philip Barantini wanted it to be totally immersive: 'By throwing the audience on a journey in real time for one hour, nonstop, and then pulling them back out again, we wanted [them] to feel like they were really experiencing it and living it, and they can't take their eyes off the screen.' Achieving this ambition was a massive undertaking, requiring three weeks of rehearsals and meticulous planning in terms of logistics, timing and flow. Shooting primarily at a studio facility in England's West Yorkshire region, each episode took five days to complete with a minimum of two takes per day. Coordinating the blocking from one room to another while maintaining a video feed so everyone could see what was happening on camera the whole time was a daily concern. Episode 2, for which cinematographer Lewis was nominated, was the most technically complex. That's because it takes place in Jamie's mazelike school, where detectives Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and Frank (Faye Marsay) go searching for the murder weapon and motive. This was filmed at the nearby Minsthorpe Community College secondary school, with 350 students wrangled from room to room during summer vacation. 'Just in terms of the geography, the location that we span was worrying,' Lewis said. 'Initially, we were going to use a much larger area of that school, and then in rehearsing and walking through the space, there was too much to cover and not enough material to cover it. So then it was a redesign of the whole school in terms of the route that we take through it.' It was up to Thorne to rewrite the script to fit the new school route while peeling back the layers of what influenced Jamie. 'It was about the school's [institutional] chaos and how it failed him, and where Bascombe is taking us as we're trying to tell this story,' he explained. The three standout scenes are when Katie's grieving best friend, Jade (Fatima Bojang), attacks Jamie's friend, Ryan (Kaine Davis), for being part of the murder during a fire drill outside; Bascombe's pursuit of Ryan when he flees the school after being asked about the murder weapon; and the ethereal drone shot that concludes the episode, surveying the town and landing on a close-up of Jamie's dad, Eddie (Graham), who leaves flowers in honor of Katie at the murder site. 'The fire drill was a hard one to choreograph,' said Lewis, who operated the camera. 'So we're all moving backwards, and behind me there's a grip spotting me and gently moving aside kids getting in the way. And just when the camera has to rush sideways with Jade before she punches Ryan in the face, it's a quick move through gaps that we preformed in the crowd.' For the chase, Lewis passed the camera through a classroom window to operator Lee David Brown, who ran after the actors. Lewis hopped onto a tracking vehicle and followed the action on a street with stunt vehicles. He then got the camera back from Brown and followed the actors into the dead-end alley, with the camera going into handheld simulation mode. 'There's so much packed into such a small section, there's so much to go wrong,' Lewis added. 'And things did go wrong in other takes.' Meanwhile, the drone shot, which was the brainchild of director Barantini, started out as a typical flyover but evolved into a close-up of Eddie thanks to the urging of executive producer Toby Bentley, who wanted Graham in the episode. But first it needed testing. 'I mounted the camera to the underside of a drone that was being held by two grips,' added Lewis. 'Each of them had a side of the drone that came over my head. I clipped it into a mount underneath the drone.' It worked — once. Yet on the day of the shoot, wind prevented the drone from taking off. They had one more shot on the last day of shooting, but it was still too windy in the morning. 'And then in the afternoon, it was like the heavens parted,' Barantini said. 'It was the most beautiful day. So we did it. But we lost connection because it was too far away. So I sat in the monitor room sweating. And I got a call over the radio saying, 'We got it!' We came back and watched the footage and it's what you see in the episode.'
