This isn't really a review, but I've been friends with the director William for a long time. We went to the same college in Chicago (though years apart) and a while after releasing Anodyne in 2013 he contacted me about playtesting an early version of MG, then called "Relativity". I think this was either the fall of 2013 or 2014... we lived in the same neighborhood. He's also of Taiwanese origin which is especially rare that we were both doing independent games.

Anyways, as it turns out, after moving elsewhere in Chicago, I ended up moving back to the same neighborhood as him a year or so later so we would meet up now and then and catch up about what our games were up to. It felt like for a long time I was just stuck on Even the Ocean, him on Manifold Garden... eventually ETO did come out in 2016, but it'd be a few more years till Manifold Garden came out. I remember meeting for coffee and hearing about his various negotiations, navigating the world of funding, building a team, etc. I remember we had breakfast at a diner when his friend Alan Hazelden (Draknek - a prolific puzzle game designer) visited.

It was through him that I heard about a game design teaching job at SAIC and taught part time at that a few years while making All Our Asias and Anodyne 2. The neighborhood we were in was a bit isolated from the (small) games scene in Chicago, so it felt like that neighborhood was our 'gamer island' of sorts...

Anyways, as time got on I would playtest and look at more complete versions of the game. Everyone got older (at some point William hit 30, I remember a birthday party). Like with my own games it was neat to see what were test spaces slowly become complete levels, or see levels moved around in the sequence of the game, or hear music and sound added for the first time.

Eventually I moved off to Japan as I released Anodyne 2, and I believe missed the launch celebration for MG! But it was nice to see it successfully launch with platform support. In later years during the pandemic I got to visit William's new office space, we also visited our alma mater and their new games program. It's been a while since I've been back but we keep in touch now and then and his studio seems to be doing well.

I don't know how much writing has been done on this, but it's a weird thing, being in a games scene for over 10 years... a lot of folks I knew early on - when we were all teenagers or early 20s - some dropped out of the scene, some are still releasing but not really on social media... people developed different styles, different life priorities and styles of making games. We see each other's games in different states of progress... always sort of subtly reflecting on our own game creation practice as we look at and unconsciously analyze and think about what the others are doing.

It's not perfect, but I enjoyed it. I was really in the mood for something like this. It's pretty much like a trippy mindfucky Portal with a gorgeous art style, packed with some cool visual tricks. Aaaand that's pretty much it. Story is basically null (you could say it doesn't really need one, though), and the puzzles are a little disappointing, specially considering how interesting the mechanics are. There were a few good ones, but it honestly felt like I was stumbling my way through most of them. But like I said, I enjoyed it anyway. If you want a short style-over-substance casual fun game, this will satisfy.

★★½ – Average ✅

Em essência, o jogo é a gamificação de vertigem com algumas cores e quebra-cabeças ao longo do caminho. Queria gostar mais do que gostei, mas me faltou engajamento para terminar o que comecei, talvez por conta do elo minimalista do jogo, talvez pela falta de interesse nos quebra-cabeças.

Independente disso, a arte é muito bela, trata-se de uma imersão dinâmica em um quadro de Escher, sobreposto com físicas anormais.

Enfim, Manifold Garden traz excelentes ideias, mas peca em alguns sentidos para os jogadores como eu, que exigem motivantes mais claros e não são tão engajados no mundo minimalista aplicado aos jogos.

A game that oozes style and has just enough substance to hold it up. In terms of atmosphere, both visually and audibly, Manifold Garden is absolutely stunning. I was constantly in awe of the buildings and environments, and found it extremely satisying to traverse the world.

The only negative for me is that the puzzle design left something to be desired, although to be clear it was still well done. I found it moderately challenging in places and overall engaging, but I did find myself wishing there was a little more to it towards the end.

I've seen hints of secret rooms and paths that I might try to investigate, but even if I don't I am very glad I played this game and would not hesistate to recommend it, even if it may be a bit light for experienced puzzle solvers.

Manifold Garden is a fantastic game. The visuals are obviously striking from the pastel colour palette to the infinitely repeating fractal archictecture. This game is really a treat for the eyes.
The puzzles are pretty challenging with the difficult gradually ramping up as you play. With the changing the gravity navigating the different levels is a puzzle in itself. It's also really rewarding to utilise the gravity mechanic to make shortcuts for yourself since falling is faster than running.
However I feel like the final puzzles couldve been a bit harder.
The music really adds a lot of atmosphere and really complements the overall aesthetic.
Honestly I spent my last few moments in the game wanderings its levels and getting lost in its beautiful abyss.

I love that this game has zero text or voice narrative. It is all visual and audio experience with wonderful puzzle design.

The infinite nature of the levels never ceased to amaze me. Portal has situations where you can fall infinitely, but I've never experienced anything like this.

I love high-concept puzzle games and this is one that commits completely to its vision and executes perfectly. This feels like a "AAA" game to me.

Extra bonus points for a wonderfully realized and free-upgrade PS5 version.

I'm a sucker for puzzle games. I've been wanting to play this since it first came out, but hadn't brought myself to it. I felt like I really needed to be in the perfect mental place for it, and I'm glad I played it in the best mindset possible.

This game is just jaw-dropping. Even after having followed the game's development for years, I wasn't ready to experience anything close to this. I was somewhat disappointing when I read this game doesn't have any story, but after playing, I really don't feel it doesn't need one. It's a pure aesthethic experience where the visuals and gameplay speak for themselves. Like Tetris, it's an experience that only works as a video game, and even more so as the game really pushes what impossible geometry and virtual exploration can do for you.

Playing this really felt like the first time I played Fez or Portal. The level design is just a f*g masterclass. I'm amazed at how really well integrated everything is. It is notably visible this was made by someone with a degree on physics. It's really beautiful not just because of the art style, but also due to the geometry's own language: symmetry, height, width, depth. The music is also a great companion; the UI is so elegant, and the controls are simple enough to submerge you into the world.

I really recommend this game, and I hope William Chyr makes another game, whatever that may be.

Style over substance. Cool marketable concept with surface level beauty and zero depth. The puzzles are so easy I thoughtlessly stumbled through 90% of the game because every solution is immediately obvious once you understand the objective. It took me 5 hours to see the ending and of that time, only about 1-2 hours were actual gameplay. When you're not forced to witness the developers selling point, you are walking around needlessly huge levels to find a button or switch. I get that a big part of this game's style is the massive abstract architecture, but it is in direct conflict with the gameplay. Puzzles might seem difficult at first, but that's only because the puzzle elements are so spread out that it takes just as long to see the entire puzzle as it does to solve it.

In other words, this is a normie puzzle game. Maybe worth checking out if you've only played a couple puzzle games and putting blocks on buttons is still an exciting concept to you.

This review also doubles as a review for Portal 2.

The depiction of an endless world here is really beautiful, there is no end nor start to the huge megastructures you traverse through, in fact, falling into the void to get on a platform you couldn't reach is a main mechanic, as the world loops over itself. Time and space have no meaning, both don't have a defined start or ending, they are simply there while you walk through them until you finally reach your goal. Or perhaps it isn't really as much of a goal as it is an inevitability. Life tends to end one way or another, even if you could life forever in an equally never-ending world, sooner or later you'll want it to be over. The scale can make you feel insignificant, but you can still bring some life and beauty to a meaningless world and give it some meaning.

Illogical architecture mixed with constantly shifting gravity plus some really, really beautiful landscapes make for a really innovative and creative puzzle game. Unfortunately, you get used to the puzzle mechanics and everything described above stops working as great as it could have at the start. The endlessness cannot be understood, you can't - or more likely, you shouldn't - get used to it. For a world as illogical as this, everything seems to work under a defined set of rules. This could be subtext on how everything in nature is defined to work in a certain way. For example, zebras have black stripes over white skin to hide better from hunters, this is something that nobody who has ever been alive has decided, it is mostly accepted as something that simply is, the same way the world of Manifold Garden is supposed to not have been created by someone but is heavily based on clearly defined rules that seem to hold a greater purpose, that purpose being to get you to reach the end. There's always an intention to everything.

The purpose of the world is perfectly defined and understandable but it wants you to think it's incomprehensible, your small size in comparison to the eternal world pretends to represent how small you actually are in comparison to the grand scheme of things, but fails because conceiving infinity is rather impossible yet Manifold Garden reduces it to a bunch of gravity and colour block puzzles. Despite all great that I said in the last two paragraphs, that is mostly stuff I've thought of while writing this, not while playing the game. That is the problem of depicting the endless as a defined set of rules, that this ends up feeling more like a technical showoff rather than a tale on passing through an unintelligible and seemingly illogical world. The greatly executed mind-bending puzzles are the real meat here. The effort is commendable, but the intention of the world can be understood really fast, as it just is to get you to the next level and consequently the ending. This is a game about contemplating the vastness of the universe in which the universe itself looks huge and bigger than life but is actually all about getting from one chamber to another. Portal if it was about shifting gravity and bizarre architecture.

Maybe the real problem of depicting something as abstract as the endless isn't that we can't associate it with something, but rather the human part of the work in which everything has to serve a purpose as specific as getting the player to the next level. I had my solid time with the puzzles tho.

The concept of objectivity when it comes to thinking about art is largely a myth. We all approach any piece of art with our own personal contexts, drawing from our own past experiences in our understanding of it. In my case, I came to Manifold Garden having already watched Jacob Geller's video The Shape of Infinity (arguably my favourite video from my favourite writer about videogames as an artform), and I don't doubt it strongly influenced my experience as a result.

That experience was one where you're thrown into boundless spaces, countless identical structures stretching eternally into the distance, making you feel dwarfed by the very notion of endlessness and then deciding to use that endlessness to your advantage. Where often the best way to reach places above you is to fall down to them. Where the very notion of what direction is even upwards becomes twisted, obscured; you end up seeing stairs or towers and assuming that means you stand right-way-up on this terrain, but these assumptions fall apart with the realisation this world is one not made for people, and as you shift gravity to turn hallways into diving shafts so you can plummet to your next location you start to question if it was really a hallway at all.

It's so hard for me not to see the game from this perspective of its reality-warping viewpoints, from how small it makes me feel, how much it has me confront the true nature of the infinite. That's with the context I'm coming at it from, but I also get that it would be easy to see it just as some neat, colourful puzzle game set in non-Euclidean spaces if you don't have the same context. Like I said, experiences with art come with associated prior experiences that build up to them, nothing we engage with exists in a vacuum. Anyways, watch that video beforehand if you intend to play this game, I think it made my time with the game meaningfully more enjoyable as a result.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm5Ogh_c0Ig

Update; I do think, reflecting on it, that whilst the best moments of the game were wonderful for me they were also not super common in part due to how the block puzzles can at times drag the game back down to normality? It's hard for them not to feel mundane against the backdrop of wonder, and for that contrast to be disruptive. There were also a couple moments of intense frustration I had in the opening hour or so where the game was poor at communicating what it needed me to do. I was fairly forgiving about all this at the time since my favourite moments in the game were concentrated near the end, but it's definitely made the game hold up a bit less positively in my memory over the past week or so.

Do you believe aesthetic can be narrative? Manifold Garden is so obsessed with its aesthetic that it forgets to use it in any interesting way aside from just looking cool. But holy shit it looks cool. I was hoping for an antichamber-style game and got a walking sim with minor puzzle elements instead, but did I mention the visuals were fantastic? If you want a 5 hour game walking through Piranesi/Escher-style architecture stretching into infinity, this is your game. And fractals. Lots of fractals at the end.

A very interesting puzzle game that gave me everything I wanted out of it, but also some bad. The game is just full of creative ideas and feels surreal to play. Each level just manages to bend your mind in a different way and it scratches a certain itch that not many games can hit. My only main problem with the game is that it just gets too tedious by the end. the puzzles aren't too difficult and are still slightly fun, it's just that I don't want to spend my time running and setting up each block for five minutes before actually making a small amount of progress just to be hit with another slog of a puzzle. Still an interesting experience, just wish it trimmed some of the extra fat.

Even though I totally recognise that Manifold Garden is a work of art, it just isn't satisfying as a game for me. If you're into long journeys with the occasional puzzle challenge, this is probably your cup of tea. I just got incredibly bored after the third Godcube, because no new mechanics were ever introduced anymore. The puzzles all started to look like -> How can I get cube from point A to point B? Literally the only interesting puzzle mechanically that wasn't a chore to complete was found in the secret route. And OH MY GOD the secret route. It is literally IMPOSSIBLE to find the entire secret route on your own. Hats off to the person who actually found this out, it must have taken them at least 500 hours to do so. Try finding a hidden door in a massive place that is supposed to loop around, where everything looks the same...I do not get the fun in that, sorry...

A really creative puzzle game that bends the mind in more ways than one. No puzzle type overstayed its welcome and the mechanics were easy to understand but difficult to navigate, matching an excellent balance of exploratory puzzles and intuitive thought process. Sound and music were superb throughout. I experienced minor performance issues on Switch, especially in larger rooms. It didn't impact my enjoyment, but it is noticeable. My most major gripe comes with navigation and orientation. Too often was I completely disoriented in an area with being unsure of where to go or even where I came from. Simple flashing markers or some sort of colored indicator could fix the issues and would prevent the meaningless wandering time.