![]() ![]() Just be wary if you suffer with motion sickness. As with all artistic endeavours, your enjoyment of Manifold Garden will be subjective, but it will certainly appeal to people hungry for an intellectually demanding experience. ![]() The puzzles are intricate and difficult at times, often requiring a moment’s reprieve from the game in order to approach it with fresh perspective. Manifold Garden is challenging and unique, a living art installation that plays with gravity and geometry itself. Despite that relatively long development cycle it doesn’t feel over-engineered as most triple A titles would by then. You can see that perspective and experience in every corner, and Chyr has laboured over Manifold Garden for almost nine years at this point. Interestingly, this is William Chyr’s first game – his varied career background had him gather experience in programming, design and 3D modelling, so moving on to creating games as art was a natural next step. Both the visual and audio elements work together to disorient and inspire the player, and that’s where Manifold Garden really begins to stand apart as a puzzle game. It balances unease and fascination on a knife-edge. The score is inspired by musicians such as Brian Eno, Pauline Oliveros, and William Basinski, lending the game’s atmosphere an appropriately otherworldly tone. Hence, Manifold Garden.” -William Chyr ( Developer)Ĭomposed by Laryssa Okada, the ambient sountrack in Manifold Garden has a haunting, ethereal quality to it and does a stellar job of heightening the feeling of isolation and wonder. “Garden” is because, well, you can plant seeds and grow trees. In the game, the world wraps around in 3D, and the official term is “ three-torus“, which is a compact manifold with no boundary. “Manifold” is a mathematical term that describes the topology of a space where locally each point is Euclidean. Some of the puzzles will require genuine thought and reflection to overcome, as Manifold Garden demands the player observe the challenges from unusual perspectives. It is not, however, a casual stroll through some pretty, confusing pictures. ![]() Twinned with re-imagining the fundamental rules of physics and how the architecture and view changes as a result makes for a mind-bending experience. Gameplay involves hitting switches, moving cubes, redirecting water, or changing the cubes properties amongst other things. I’m sure I wasn’t the only child in the world that used to put their legs in the air and imagine what it would be like if the ceiling was the floor – Manifold Garden is that in game form, designed to render the laws of physics utterly irrelevant. Each plane of gravity takes on one of six colours in order for players to better understand their surroundings. Having no in-game tutorial, the game begins by enabling the player to understand their environment before tackling a puzzle. Whilst exploring this staggeringly intricate universe, the player is able to shift gravity and see the world from a variety of different perspectives. I later found that the gravity change setting can be changed from ‘S mode’ to instant, which helped a little with the sudden inertia. That being said, never being one to usually suffer with motion sickness, it was something I experienced when playing Manifold Garden for the first time. Luckily, the background’s colour palette is somewhat subdued, and that makes it easier on the eye in the long run. It has a similarly retina-warping effect which has you constantly scanning the environment for some hidden imagery. Each environment consisting of expansive, repeating structures that are somewhat reminiscent of 90’s Magic Eye pictures – albeit slightly less vomit inducing. Manifold Garden is half first-person puzzler, half graphical art installation. Navigate an Escher-esque environment and utilise gravity, perspective and infinity in order to solve physics-defying puzzles. ![]() Manifold Garden is an abstract, first-person puzzle game made by American artist, William Chyr. ![]()
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