From solo Chicago-based indie developer William Chyr, here we have the mysterious puzzle game Manifold Garden. It’s a physics bending and mesmerising time of it, although probably not the best title for anyone with motion sickness.
Technically, this is a first-person puzzle game. But there’s a lot more to it than that, with the chance to reconsider gravity in the style of an M. C. Escher network painting. It’s all very visually striking and dramatic, requiring patience in puzzle solving and a whole lot more.
To Infinity and Beyond in Manifold Garden
This is available on PC and all consoles. You can even get it on smartphone! It first launched in 2019 and has since been nominated for various gaming awards.
You can think of it as a more involved version of ustwo’s Monument Valley series.
As a concept, Manifold Garden takes that and warps it into a quite mind-bending concept. As the player, you can manipulate gravity—you turn walls into walls.
Each area you visit you can flip, allowing you to walk to new areas, then manipulate objects to open doorways.
In other words, you flip gravity.
The main elements to the game are exploration and puzzle solving, which gets tricky fast as you try to keep track of everything in your brain. Although Manifold Garden does give you a helping hand with the use of six distinct colours, carefully guiding you towards a destination.
Crucial to success is taking your time and setting a sedate pace. The game’s world is designed to savour, plus you’ll likely get lost fast if you blast through it.
You get about five hours of gameplay here, but some players have been speedrunning the game. The result is faster times, although we still recommend you take time to enjoy this one. Visually, it’s spectacular.
If you’ve played Valve’s excellent Portal 2 then you’ll get a solid idea for what’s going on here. It’s just as warping with reality, if not more so, but one of its core strengths is its accessibility.
Although it helps if you’re not a complete imbecile, William Chyr designed his debut game to provide subtle hints of what to do, where to go, and how to enjoy yourself.
Architecturally studious as it is, Manifold Garden is deeply enthralling.
But we must add its wall bending, gravity defying concept can mess with your head. Literally—you may get motion sickness issues with extended play. Just as well there’s not a huge 50+ hour playtime, but even so… you’ve been warned!
Away from that, this is an excellent puzzle game that offers endless depths and artistic beauty. Serene, weird, often quite jaw-dropping. Play with your headphones on to get the most of its immersive qualities.
As this is a triumph of indie game design and gaming as a creative pursuit.
The Architectural Inspirations Behind Manifold Garden
Manifold Garden is one of the most deeply architectural video games we’ve ever played. Chyr has highlighted the work of Tadao Ando and Brutalist architecture inspired much of the game’s inner, looping world.
He also focussed on aspects of interior design to “lend spaces character”.
As explained in his above video, he turned to India’s famous Chand Baori stepwell to create a sense of scale. That and the looping pattern designs and stairwells are a big part of the Manifold Garden experience.
Prior to game development, Chyr’s focus was on enormous balloon sculptures. However, it was in game development he found no limit to the scope of a project.
In the world of games, architectural designs can be as enormous as the developer wants.
To achieve that, the world of Manifold Garden repeats itself infinitely. If you drop off a ledge, you’ll keep on swooping down until you land onto something. That’s what creates some of the game’s most ingenious puzzles (for example, leaping off with a block to stick into a switch seemingly lightyears below).
All the hard work paid off as the game was (and still is) very well received, with strong reviews and nominations for Game of the Year in various publications.
