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.

Sights & Sounds
- Gorgeous abstract visuals throughout
- Screenshots, while pretty, don't do the game justice. Traversing the world is a whole different level
- The music is light background electronic music ranging from austere to ominous

Story & Vibes
- It's an abstract puzzle game; there's no narrative
- Instead, just enjoy the splendor

Playability & Replayability
- The puzzles are all perspective-based, so people with good spatial awareness will probably like this game
- Besides running around and moving colorful cubes, you'll also shift gravity around quite a bit, both for moving around the levels and for solving puzzles
- Not sure I'll be back for a replay

Overall Impressions & Performance
- If you're a fan of pretty visuals and sometimes tricky puzzles, this is for you
- Played the first few parts on PC, then finished up on the Steam Deck. Ran very well on both

Final Verdict
- 7.5/10. If it seems up your alley visually and you enjoy puzzles, buy with confidence. Keep in mind it's between 5 and 10 hours depending on how often you get stuck

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.

as a presentational piece taken on its own? it's really good, great visuals, great music, very cool.

the catch here is that you have to play the actual game, which is way, way too easy and trivial, and never really gets any more difficult than the first couple puzzles in portal and antichamber. you know, the ones where you're just being taught how to press a button or put a cube on a pressure plate. at least half of the time spent in this game is walking through hallways, pressing buttons, or grabbing cubes off of trees and putting them in their color-designated receptacle, all of which are more tasks of persistence than of being able to solve anything.

begins to approach some interesting puzzle concepts once or twice in that last stage, but it never really gets there. shame, since it looks and sounds so good

There's a temptation to describe Manifold Garden only by comparing it to its spiritual forebear: Antichamber. Many reviews of the game have done so, and while I resent the idea that the first game to implement a certain mechanic or aesthetic becomes the default by which all that come after must be compared to, I found that when I started looking closer, the comparison became more and more interesting.

There's just no getting away from it. Manifold Garden looks and plays like an Antichamber 2 that never came to pass. The game is built on similar non-euclidean geometry, coloured block puzzles and coated in near-identical stark white visuals. But where Antichamber felt claustrophobic and confusing, purposely so, Manifold is enormous and breathtaking. The structures differ entirely too, with the latter game taking place over a series of fairly linear levels interspersed with gorgeous, geometric vistas, where the former was a tangled mess of interlocking corridors. The goals of both games are completely different, even if their methods are very similar.

I don't like Antichamber very much. I think it's main puzzle mechanics are completely antithetical to its MC Escher gimmick and on the whole, it's largely charmless. I do really like Manifold Garden though, for many of the same reasons I dislike its predecessor. It's not a particularly difficult game, I breezed through it in less than four hours and never found myself stuck for more than a minute or two at a time. It's lacks narrative too, but I don't regard that as a drawback, as the simple, gameplay and visuals driven story is a surprisingly beautiful one. Despite the complete absence of characters or words, I found myself feeling quite emotional as the ending played out. The world may not make sense, but there is a clear goal and in achieving that goal, I felt accomplished and like I had done something good and worthwhile. Antichamber's ending just left me confused and disappointed, like a teenager's failed attempt at sex. Manifold also hides a secret, non-linear second playthrough too, which I greatly look forward to experiencing in the future.

Manifold Garden is by no means an amazing game. Its puzzles are at times too simple and I would have loved a DLC that would just push its puzzle mechanics to their extreme, but what's here is undoubtedly great. If you found yourself disappointed by Antichamber or you're a fellow Portal fan with a penchant for the strange, absolutely give Manifold Garden a play.

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.

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.

This visually stunning puzzle game has two main mechanics: ever-repeating level copies in all 6 spacial directions and the ability to change the direction of gravity to one of these.

However, for some reason the devs forgot to design puzzles that revolve around both mechanics at the same time. So for most of the fairly easy and mostly forgettable puzzles you are either in small indoor segments you solve by changing gravity or you are outside on a specific gravitational plane where you may use the "infinite iterations of the level"-feature.

Both are really cool concepts but not enough to be fun for 5+ hours of gameplay especially when not even combined and put to use for harder puzzles. It was only enjoyable due to the visuals and because I like maths.

What really sets the game apart aren't the puzzles but the atmosphere. The fractal based visuals and the atmospheric soundtrack make this one of the most unique puzzle games out there. The endless repetition isn't just for show either since most of the puzzles will require you to fall onto the next iteration of the same level. This might also be triggering for some people because even though most of it is only really happening on a 27 inch screen in front of me, I had goosebumps from my fear of heights almost throughout. Some trippy sequences and areas also gave me this weird fight-or-flight feeling and I was tense through a lot of it but not at all in a bad way. There's really nothing that can hurt you in the game though some of the visuals are meant to be somewhat unsettling. The dev really found an incredible theme here and executed it perfectly. The way the geometry just fades out into infinity makes for some thrilling sights almost every step of the way.

On the puzzle front, the game isn't particularly tough. You're mostly trying to navigate and find the puzzle or execute what you know you want to do more often than figure much of it out. You're mostly interacting with blocks and trying to get them into the right pads and other mechanics that I don't want to spoil. It's a fairly short game and I finished it in about 4.5 hours with minimal help at one point cause I forgot a mechanic but otherwise the most confused you'll be is when looking for what to do next.

I'd recommend this to anyone looking for an FPS puzzler a la Antichamber which this seems to use heavily as inspiration for the structure. The visuals and atmosphere alone are worth the price of admission.