MANIFOLD GARDEN
Forget weeds, this backyard is all zen
Few games can boast visuals as good as this. It’s not down to the graphics, though they certainly are crisp, but the design. This puzzler leads you through MC-Escher-inspired worlds of non-Euclidean geometry and looks beautiful while it does it. (Unsurprisingly its creator, William Chyr, has a background as an artist and sculptor.) It’s so good-looking that we’d easily pay the same cost as the game for a single art print of one of its intricate vistas.
Of course, in Manifold Garden, you don’t just look at static pictures. Playing in first-person, these puzzle rooms are fully three-dimensional for you to explore and view from pretty much any angle. Right from the start you’re able to hit i to manipulate gravity while next to a surface to snap yourself to that plane, allowing yourself to then fall great heights, Gravity Rush-style, or simply walk up walls. That said, because of how everything is designed, there aren’t usually obvious indicators that any of the gravity directions is properly ‘up’, and the environment is generally designed to allow you to easily manipulate yourself to pretty much any plane of gravity at any time. To ease confusion, each plane is tied to a colour that tints the world.
Your goal is to use colour-coded cubes tied to particular planes of gravity (and grown from strange cuboid trees) to access dark cube seeds that can then be purified, restoring a sort of hub world and ridding it of a dark, foggy corruption. To do this you work through one colour cube at a time – each cube has its own world.
It’s a fairly short game, so there isn’t a huge number of new gimmicks to learn, but new puzzle types are added and these usually see you operating in smaller-scale rooms while you get the hang of them. For instance, later in the game you use cubes to redirect streams of life-giving water, or move gigantic blocks around in the environment by shifting gravity to create new pathways. There’s just the right amount of puzzle per mechanic, and even without explicit instruction you can usually work out even the tougher puzzles just by virtue of the interactions being pleasingly simple. The difficulty comes when you’re mentally juggling a few of those threads at once, but they’re always satisfying to overcome.
TREE OF LIFE
The frustrations mostly occur when, in some of the larger areas, you can’t locate a door you need to find or a small cube essential for solving a puzzle. These only gave us minor setbacks, but it was still more annoying to be stumped while looking for a puzzle-solving tool than when solving the puzzle itself. The larger puzzle areas are
“MANIPULATE GRAVITY WHILE NEXT TO A SURFACE TO SNAP YOURSELF TO THAT PLANE.”
essentially infinitely sized, as they usually take place in exteriors that loop infinitely around on themselves, giving you unique perspectives such as looking below yourself to figure out what’s above you. Somehow, it all feels quite natural to explore despite being quite the opposite. Thanks to an ability to sprint with p and use gravity to fall pretty fast, even the larger spaces don’t feel like a pain to navigate. Sometimes, though, the detail in some of those larger areas can make it hard to sort what’s puzzle-critical from what’s just an extra detail, and you might end up feeling briefly lost.
CUBIST PAINTING
In many ways, Manifold Garden is an unforgettable experience. The crisp, endless environments of looping steps and intricate architecture are amazing to look at throughout the game, and the puzzles are nicely balanced across the bite-sized run time (it took us four hours to complete).
But the game struggles to be more than that. By the time we hit credits we’ve enjoyed a sumptuous feast for our peepers, but we’ve not come away feeling very differently about ourselves, or been particularly challenged by what is, at its core, block-based puzzles which sometimes have a reflective element. The game is at its best when it’s forcing us to wrangle the strange geometry and the way some portals don’t make architectural sense within structures – and while those are puzzle components, it often ends up coming back to the cubes.
VERDICT
Worth playing for the visuals alone, to take in and explore these strange and beautiful environments, which will be timeless. The puzzles are fun, but not as revolutionary. Oscar Taylor-Kent