Manifold Garden

In most video games, gravity is more of a loose concept than a law. Players double-jump and drop from great heights with impunity, explosions blast vehicles sky-high, and even the most novice soldier can throw a grenade clear across a battlefield. Indie developer William Chyr has dreamed up his own unique take on general relativity, giving players the power to shift, flip, and fall their way through surreal landscapes that would make M.C. Escher’s head spin. The core puzzle mechanic in Manifold Garden allows players to change their center of gravity at will by walking up to any perpendicular surface and pulling the trigger. Doing so automatically hops you onto the new plane, shifting your viewpoint of the environment by 90 degrees.

The first few puzzle rooms are simple affairs designed to acclimate you to your newfound gravitational freedom, and the stark art style makes it easy to shift your own perspective on the environments. After a few minutes I was transitioning effortlessly between floors, walls, and ceilings, and jogging up (down?) the undersides of stairways in each increasingly complex area. Soon, a series of colored cubes introduce a new snag; like in any number of other puzzle games, you must pick these cubes up and place them on switches to open their corresponding doors. However, each color of cube has its own fixed gravity, and can only be moved when you are aligned to the same plane. The puzzles quickly ramp up in difficulty as they start combining multiple cubes with different gravitational pulls, as well as multidirectional cubes that can travel in both directions on a given axis.

Thankfully, every time you realign yourself the “floor” color shifts to match the corresponding gravitational cubes, which helps mitigate the confusion. At least some of it, anyway.

After solving a series of puzzles in confined rooms and hallways, I stepped out into an open landscape full of infinitely repeating towers. Jumping off the edge didn’t end in a game over screen. Instead, I continued falling through space until the areas seamlessly looped around again, a feature Chyr takes advantage of in later puzzles.

I look forward to seeing what other vertigo-inducing tricks Chyr is cooking up for Manifold Garden’s strange and surprising world.