Welcome to our review of Manifold Garden, a game aiming to take the puzzle genre into a real 3D setting.
Reimagine Physics. Explore the Infinite. Manifold Garden is a game that reimagines the laws of physics.
Rediscover gravity and explore a beautiful Escher-esque world of impossible architecture. Geometry repeats infinitely in every direction, and falling down leads you back to where you started. Manipulate gravity to change your perspective and see the world in new ways. Master the rules of the universe and restore a barren world with vegetation and life.
An expansive and visually striking world filled with mind-bending puzzles. Manipulate gravity to gain new perspectives and walk on any visible surface. Explore expansive architecture that repeats infinitely. Manifold Garden has been nominated for several awards, including “Best Debut” from the Game Developers Choice Awards. It was selected as one of the New Yorker’s best games of 2019.
And it deserves such praise as it is both a wacky as well as an amazingly designed puzzle game. In Manifold Garden you are basically walking around a building and to advance in your quest, you need to solve very basic puzzles at first and real mind-benders in the end. So basically you need to activate a button at first that opens the door to the next place in the building and slowly but surely, more mechanics are being introduced.
One of them, basic gravity, which is the bomb in this game. You can flip the world 90 degrees to the next dimension basically and it just makes you fall down if you are careless. Usually, this is used to go up walls in order to reach the next floor, first by flipping the dimension 90 degrees, and then when you are where you need to be, you flip back. This mechanic can even be used to “walk upstairs” later in the game.
Another mechanic you get to enjoy, the ability to pick up an item to move it towards an activation point and while it sounds easy at first, this gets complicated as you go along. Remember those comments I made a minute ago about walking upstairs? Now imagine you have this block to carry around and while this is easy to get the hang off, it sure is complicated to tell someone playing the game how to handle a seemingly simple task like this.
Manifold Garden is possibly one of the better puzzle games of the moment but it is, in my humble opinion, on the harder side of the spectrum so it may not be for everyone at first as I did seemingly have to use my spatial location skills more than once in the first 5 minutes alone with this game. It may be not for everyone, but to be honest, I had my fun with the game. I guess I just love these oddball games way too much.
In conclusion, Manifold Garden is a special type of puzzle game that is reserved for the true fan of the genre. I literally just covered peanuts about this game as it is important to discover it all for yourself, you can thank me later!
