Indie Game of the Week 411: Manifold Garden

Me and my boy Euclid go way back, like twenty-three centuries back, but even though the dude is a bona fide power gamer—calculating those FPS kill angles in real-time like a monster—there are the occasional games I'll play where I just don't think they're going to be his scene. 2019's Manifold Garden by William Chyr is one such "non-Euclidean" game, taking after the abstract and minimalist likes of Antichamber and NaissanceE to present a bizarre world where you sort of have to outwit an environment that's doing its best to befuddle you in turn.

Stuck in a Droste effect dimension, where the current area repeats endlessly in all six directions (north, west, south, east, up, and down, or at least whatever you interpret those directions to be at any given moment), your unseen protagonist is able to manipulate gravity to switch any of these six sides to become their new "floor" in order to complete the usual environmental puzzles of moving boxes and redirecting flows to activate buttons with the eventual goal of making their way to the next portal and the next part of the game. There's a relatively simple structure behind the mind-meltingly vertiginous dimension-hopping in that you're finding a series of "god cubes" by returning a glitchy dark block to some sort of tree in order to purge the current area of a disconcerting amount of corruption, represented as murky clouds that shy away at your presence. The game keeps you somewhat grounded by representing the six possible sides with respective colors: red, blue, green, yellow, orange, and purple. In most cases, a box or a pedestal you might spot in the vicinity will be color-coded to help you reorient yourself to the relevant gravitational plane before you can then move onto how exactly they're involved in the current conundrum.

The game sounds complex as hell and it kinda is, but it also has that intuitive aspect where you'll probably glean at least half the solution to any given puzzle just by messing around a little with trial and error. Even though you're capable of switching between six different perspectives the chances are you'll only ever need a couple for the current puzzle room and you just need to start thinking with those restrictions to greatly reduce the amount of possible moves at your disposal. Even in the later game where the sheer size of these repeating areas threatens to bewilder you, the number of actual moving parts related to the puzzle at hand is usually relatively sparse and something that shouldn't keep you stymied for long. Obviously with any puzzle game it's a "mileage may vary" scenario but I was gliding through the game despite its intimidation factor and, as I always like to stress, I am something of a dummy.

That deceptive simplicity isn't to denigrate the game—the opposite even, as Manifold Garden is free to work its disorienting magic while still maintaining an approachable level of difficulty that will frequently put you in a cycle of thinking, "Oh unmerciful gods of geometry, what fresh hell is this? What even do I need to do here?" that gradually transforms into "Oh, right, well that all just worked out nicely, time to press on" in a matter of minutes. It's also oddly paced which mostly works in its favor: You could spend up to an hour getting one of the god cubes unlocked and then be almost done with the next in what feels like a handful of moments. Some require a chain of puzzles to solve while others might only need one or two big ones: the game's slow about introducing new mechanics in an effort to never overwhelm its audience, but by the time you reach the mid-point where you're changing the directions of rivers and growing boxfruit that can be two colors simultaneously you've pretty much seen everything the game intends to show you. Reason why I feel this pace works in the game's favor is that you'll be unexpectedly invigorated by a short tenure with one god cube sequence that will then motivate you into pushing through what might be a much harder and more involved subsequent section of the game.

As is often the case with simplistic first-person puzzle games like this I really love the minimalist aesthetic with its flat hues and cel-shaded geometry. Even if the environments are simplistic in a textural sense there's frequently some elaborate looking architecture that makes effective use of all those right angles and it can provide vistas that are occasionally stunning in their abstract beauty. I haven't seen that new Adrien Brody picture yet but I can recognize Brutalism when I see it and the ever-present Droste effect makes those structures all the more striking to take in when standing in the more open air areas of the game. Despite all the hard and indifferent gray lines and walls there's a smattering of what approaches natural beauty in certain areas, like cuboid trees that provide the boxfruit needed for puzzles or the flocks of mono-colored birds that appear after placing each of the god cubes, not to mention the incredible fractals that form upon the creation of these god cubes. It's a game that's never not wowing you with one impressive visual or another, even if those same visuals often feel like they exist purely just to obfuscate and discombobulate as you attempt to navigate this alien world. Manifold Garden isn't quite as interesting and multifaceted with its puzzles as Antichamber but I found myself deeply compelled by what this game had to say, albeit in a "zero dialogue, all contextual" fashion. As for my buddy Euclid, though, I might just recommend he stick to Fortnite. I hear they're adding TMNT skins!

Rating: 5 out of 5.