App Army Assemble: The Valley of the Architects – “Does this elevator puzzler go all the way to the top?”

Valley of the Architects is a beautiful-looking puzzler that promises elevator-based conundrums that make you think, alongside bringing an engaging narrative. That’s a tricky pairing to pull off, so we handed the game over to our App Army to see if they believe it achieved this lofty goal.

Here’s what they said:

Torbjörn Kämblad

When looking at the screenshots for Valley of the Architects, I got the impression of a puzzler akin to Monument Valley. This was, however, far from the truth once I got to play the game. The Valley of the Architects is basically an elevator puzzler where you move the protagonist from point A to point B. Sure, there are a lot of obstacles in the way, such as stoppers, and elevators not moving at the same pace. Still, it is not too far from another elevator puzzle game I got to try not too long ago – Going Up. And Going Up is a more focused experience, in my opinion.

As puzzlers go, The Valley is not bad and has great presentation and quite an elaborate story compared to most in the genre. It bends the mind and forces a lot of trial and error. One thing worth mentioning is that I enjoy the option to play in either landscape or portrait orientation.

Jim Linford

From what I have played, I liked the look of the levels. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I found out it was an elevator puzzler. On my phone, the graphics look great, and the game has a lot of care given to it. I’m not so good with logic puzzles or puzzles in general. I had to do a bit of trial and error. Unfortunately, haven’t had time to dive in further.

Mark Abukoff

A nice, challenging elevator puzzler with several different options and obstacles. The story is good, but what I especially enjoy is how real the buildings look and feel. Also, the ability to reset, fix your error, and try again. As is always the case, as you progress, the tools/obstacles ramp up the difficulty, but it’s definitely a logic/engineering puzzler that I enjoyed. Controls worked pretty well. I liked being able to zoom in and out, and it’s always good when you can switch from portrait to landscape mode. Overall, a very good game. Easy recommendation.

Oksana Ryan

This is an elevator puzzler that sets out to challenge you from the beginning. The idea is to move Liz through her journey to find the lost secret of the architect. The gameplay is straightforward, and there is a good tutorial to get you started. The objective is to make your way across the screen to the exit by using elevators and blocking or allowing them to stop them at the right position to achieve your goal, which I found complicated at times but not insurmountable. However, despite the fact that there was a journey to be travelled, after a while, the challenges began to feel a little repetitive. Still, on the whole, I’d recommend it for puzzle lovers.

Robert Maines

The Valley of the Architects is a puzzle game whose story centres on Liz’s journey in Africa to uncover the secrets of a Lost Architect. The story progresses by solving a series of puzzles that consist of elevators that need to be arranged so Liz can walk to the exit. You have no control over Liz once you hit the Go button, get it wrong, and you need to reset and try again. Things start off simple enough, but as directional blockers and teleports are introduced, the difficulty ramps up.

The graphics and sound do the job without being outstanding. The tutorials are a great help, and I was soon engrossed in solving the levels. I wish the help system was less limited, but I still enjoyed playing this puzzler.

Bruno Ramalho

I started to play this game on an iPad in landscape mode, and I liked it very much, where you can see the landscape around the buildings (and depending on your hardware, you can go into settings and enhance your graphics settings to max to make it look even better). But then I switched to my iPhone, where the landscape mode makes everything look so very small that I went for portrait mode, and really like what the developers did here, they zoom into the building itself, and everything looks quite big and detailed, very user friendly (you can adjust the zoom with your fingers if you like).

Now, about the game, this is a very good-looking puzzler, with an engaging story accompanying it, being narrated by our character in her pursuit of understanding this famous architect, who was somehow a myth and a mystery. In this game, you have these buildings with a lot of elevators and floors, and you need to move a person from point A to point B. For this, you need to sync the movement of the elevators and adjust some more elements on screen (like stoppers and others) so that everything is in sync and your character walks right to the end without going against a wall.

This is mainly a counting numbers game, where you really need to count the number of moves an elevator makes so you can sync it with the movement of the player and the other elevators. The tutorial is very well made and explains everything quite well with simple challenges.

And then it slowly presents you with stoppers and other different elements with different mechanics, and you understand that there are multiple persons to reach a specific coloured door, or even the same door, which makes it even more challenging. There is an option in settings that allows you to enable the number of moves for each elevator, which is quite helpful. All in all, a very nice game that got me hooked, trying to solve challenge after challenge.

Sangeet Shukla

The Valley of the Architects is not your average puzzle game, even at level 1, I found it to make excellent use of my intellect. There are ray-tracing vibes on the phone screen thanks to graphics. The stoppers, elevators, and various gaps and different structures of each elevator wall must all be timed correctly. To comprehend how each item in a given level works and finish the level, we can speed things up and down. All in all, it’s an extremely challenging puzzler.

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