Frank Underwood is going indie.
Kevin Spacey’s fictional president in House of Cards is well known for his love of shoot-’em-ups like Call of Duty, but in season 3, he’s spotted playing two independently produced mobile games: an iPad puzzle quest called Monument Valley and the interactive story mod called The Stanley Parable.
Monument Valley plays a surprisingly important role in the plot of the third season. Luckily for Ustwo, the U.K.-based company behind the game, sales have skyrocketed for the app.
Underwood plays Monument Valley in a close-up shot for almost two minutes; later, he mentions it by name to his staffers. It turns out that Underwood found out about the game through a review written by the writer Thomas Yates, whom the president recruits to write some propaganda about his controversial jobs plan. Here’s the (fictional) review:
“Whoever you are, whoever you think you are, believe also you’re a silent princess. Your name is Ida, your journey is one through a forgotten landscape of twisting staircases and morphing castles, atop floating stones defiantly crossing an angry sea, within dimly lit caverns cobwebbed with ruins, M.C. Escher could only grasp at in a dream state.”
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