Manifold Garden Review

Manifold Garden is inspired by Escher drawings and the reality-bending moments in the film Inception. You play from a first-person perspective and explore a beautiful, and what seems to be an abstract world, bereft of colour. It takes time to master and enjoy, but with patience and effort offers an experience like encountering an ancient cathedral.

You soon discover that you can walk up to any surface and press a button to change gravity to that plane. You are basically turning walls into floors. Each of these surfaces is colour coded and you can only interact with objects of the corresponding colour. This sets up a basic puzzle challenge of geometry, gravity, doors and buttons.

After an hour or so, the game opens up and makes it clear that the architecture is in fact the real puzzle. The worlds are not as big as they first appear as they are constructed of repeating elements. This not only makes it mind-bending to explore but allows you to manipulate this repetition to make impossible jumps by repeatedly falling.

To begin with, you will be constantly wondering "what just happened". As you develop an instinct for navigating the world, Manifold Garden becomes a grand architectural landscape you can not only explore but master. This culminates in cultivating a garden to open new paths forward, where an eternal expanse awaits.