Manifold Garden
Developer/publisher William Chyr Studio Format iOS, PC (tested) Release Out now
The infinite monkey theorem holds that, given an infinite amount of time, a monkey seated at a typewriter will eventually recreate the works of Shakespeare. In Manifold Garden, we are the monkey. William Chyr Studio’s physics-led puzzle game, seven years in the making, wields the concept of infinity with unparalleled grace. The same cannot be said of us: our initial attempts at wrapping our heads around its impossible architecture are clumsy, and slow. But Manifold Garden is a space composed of endless patience, where second chances come around, and around, and around.
Early on, the game gets one of its own from us. It has to be the most underwhelming opener we’ve seen in a while: we’re trapped in cold glass-and-concrete corridors, and told to place coloured cubes (plucked from curious trees) on their corresponding switches to open doors and progress. The main wrinkle is that we’re able to shift gravity – each of the six directions is assigned its own colour of the rainbow, the world tinting surfaces to help keep us oriented – to walk on walls and reach otherwise inaccessible places. Videogames being what they are, dancing on the ceiling is not exactly a revolutionary concept nowadays. And, as we progress through chamber after sterile chamber of pedestrian block puzzles, we begin to wonder whether the world outside the windows is merely set dressing. We glimpse geometric castles in the sky, and long to explore them; once we are finally released from the tedium of stacking cubes on top of cubes, we realise we already are.
From the outside looking in, it’s suddenly clear that the structures floating around us are identical to the one we’ve just puzzled our way through. It’s not obvious what this really means until we try, and fail, to climb a never-ending staircase – then, to our horror, accidentally fall off the side into the blinding white void below. And keep falling. Soon, it clicks that we can move through the air to land on another part of the same structure. It doesn’t take long before the edges of Manifold Garden’s buildings start looking less like death and more like diving boards. There are no ends in infinity. This shift in thinking – most often prompted by the wide-open spaces outside the puzzle chambers – is the real magic of Manifold Garden, which puts down roots and unfurls alongside its areas, and the worldtrees that we plant at the close of each of them.
The puzzles themselves are gently taxing: all are based around cubes and switches. Most cubes align with only a single colour-slash-gravity, and lock into place when you shift to another perspective; much of the challenge in many puzzles is figuring out how to move one to your desired position, often using different colour blocks as platforms to hold them in place, or working out how to make efficient use of blocks that obey more than one gravitational pull. But variations on these simple, rather lifeless themes often delight. In one section, water cascades down between the branches of a tree and across the floor; cubes inscribed with arrows can be rotated to change its flow, redirecting it to water mills and to grow new trees that sprout more cubes. In another, rotating the world’s gravity is our means of solving a gigantic three-dimensional maze at the centre of it. Then there’s the one we hear coming before we see it – ominous, rumbling thuds, as if a giant is stomping around outside of the poky hallway we’re working our way through. To tell you what we see when we step outside once more would be to rob you of one of Manifold Garden’s many moments of awe.
Indeed, the garden’s al fresco audiovisual splendour is perhaps the main motivator to persevere through block-on-switch puzzle sections contained in blank, grey cells. The thinking is doubtless to teach players the fundamentals of each new law of physics in neutral spaces, before unleashing them on souped-up versions in the free-flying world outside. But almost all of these preceding sections feel overlong. The longer we play, the more naturally we find ourselves picking up the unorthodox rules of Manifold Garden – and still the game insists we do our homework before we’re allowed to play outside. This is not a long game, but the pacing has gone awry. So, too, has some of the signposting: in a world designed to trick the eye and mind, it’s perhaps inevitable. Sometimes we catch ourselves walking a looping corridor designed to force us to look elsewhere; we ignore a similarly endless-looking set of stairs later, only to eventually discover that it’s simply a lengthy staircase, and that our objective is at the top of it.
At least we could never attribute the pacing issues to those long walks. The act of moving through Manifold Garden is its most spellbinding feature, as we marvel at its scenery while glide-sprinting across its surfaces, flipping between them on a whim, leaping into the abyss just for the view, only to land exactly where we started. When this combines with and elevates its basic puzzle elements, the effect is magical. But even when it doesn’t, there is something about being in this place. We feel held by Manifold Garden. There are no ‘game over’s, only a zen-like cycle until you are enlightened enough to progress beyond it. Chyr’s creation feels strangely real, as trees flourish under your care, and birds swoop through eternally repeating cathedrals. What could have been a nightmare is instead a beautiful meditation on the human brain, nature, mathematics, time, space and creation. The puzzle cubes, we find out early on, are more like seeds. And, as time passes in the garden, our monkey-brain turns inevitably to Shakespeare: to Hamlet, and his musing on humanity. What a piece of work is man, Manifold Garden seems to say – and yet, a quintessence of dust.
There are no ‘game over’s, only a zen-like cycle until you are enlightened enough to progress beyond it