Manifold Garden
Year: 2019
Rating: E
Time Played: 5+ hours
I first saw the trailer for Manifold Garden on a Nintendo Switch indie showcase. The visual style and gameplay mechanic were interesting enough for me to download this indie first-person puzzle game. I had seen nothing like it before and its infinitely repeating, fractal-like world appealed to the mathematician in me. Still, there’s only so much you can do with a concept like this, so it’s a good thing Manifold Garden didn’t overstay its welcome.
It’s difficult to avoid comparisons to other first-person physics puzzle games. You might have a hit like Portal 2 or a pastiche of Portal 2 like Q.U.B.E. 2. Manifold Garden, fortunately, doesn’t lean too heavily on Portal 2‘s mechanics. Instead, it uses the “rotate” feature to modify gravity, thus manipulating the elements needed to solve each puzzle. Plus, the cel-shaded and monochromatic color-coded visual style (similar to Gris) easily helps the player to know how the environment is currently oriented. I also appreciated how shortcuts opened up as I solved each puzzle, thus making traveling around this world simpler as the game progressed.
While this game lived up to my expectations, there were a few points where I found the next step in the puzzle to be far from obvious. Normally, this wouldn’t bother me so much. However, with infinitely looping levels, I spent way more time fumbling around, trying to figure out what to do next. Not only did I have to try everything at my disposal in one gravity setting, but I had to do this for five other gravity settings as well. When I finally broke down and looked up a walkthrough, I felt stupid for how obvious the solution was in hindsight. I wish this only happened once in this game, but it happened at least two more times before I reached the end credits.
A visually interesting take on the first-person gravity puzzler, I give Manifold Garden 4.0 stars out of 5.
