Manifold Garden

A serene gravity-switching puzzler.

There have been quite a few games that play with the fun of gravity. Antichamber’s mindbending puzzles, Dandara’s explosive wall-jumping and the upcoming Boundary’s zero-G shooting – all grant the player the ability to defy physics. William Chyr’s first-person physics-based puzzler, Manifold Garden, also lets you mess with the force of gravity, but in this game your playground is the never-ending, mindbending realms of infinity.

Waltz up to any visible surface in Manifold Garden’s geometric world and you’ll automatically flip gravity so that the wall becomes the floor. Using this ability, players are tasked with solving a number of gravitymanipulation puzzles and working out how to progress through Manifold’s many eternal spaces.You’re forever being confronted with colossal towers, cathedral-like edifices, massive windows, neverending flights of stairs – it’s bonkers. There are giant cubic trees that grow square blocks that you can pluck from their branches like fruit.

Manifold Garden’s puzzles have a straightforward core logic – mostly they just require you to move cubes onto buttons. Sounds simple enough, but the catch is each block can only be moved when they share the player’s gravitational orientation, and the matching button usually lies past a series of baffling obstacles.

Manifold’s world is cleverly shaped so that it wraps around itself in a never-ending loop, meaning that if you look out into the distance you can see the same structure that you’re standing on mirrored all around you. Step off the edge on one of these structures and you’ll fall directly into the one underneath you – actually the same one. It actually ends up being a useful way of getting around the maze of walkways.

It’s a joy to try and work out Manifold Garden’s impossible geometry and dizzying infinite world. It’s an intricate and impressive spectacle – it took William Chyr seven years of development to make, and it shows. When I finish playing it the first time I immediately start again, just to revisit some of its fascinating spaces.

Verdict

A serene gravity-flipping puzzle game with impossible, infinite structures.