A beautiful fractal puzzle game that has you exploring set pieces infinitely repeated upon themselves. Within these minimalist renderings you can explore by moving to any adjacent surface, find interactables, and try to figure out how to proceed to the next area - normally just by finding a switch, placing objects in set locations, or redirecting a flow of liquid to another location.

This game really blew me away with the sheer scale of its infinite spaces. It oozes atmosphere from its surreal liminal sandboxes, and the puzzles are just as fascinating as the solutions are devilish creating some mind blowing physics interactions that make use of the infinitely tessellating space.

While there is no real story to speak of the abstract goings on throughout each level are well worth the price of admission as you're treated to some wonderful visuals from start to finish, and for the avid puzzler every stage has an alternative solution which gives a great excuse to replay such a unique and interesting game.

High marks for creativity, a truly unique experience, and clever but simple mechanics that draw on the fractal world making you think in entirely new ways.

QUE JOGO LINDO PERFEITO MARAVILHOSO. eu acho que ele tem uma das mecânicas mais criativas e inovadoras que eu já vi.
eu acho que é muito fácil você se perder nesse jogo, mas também é fácil se achar. poderia falar horas como o game design desse jogo é incrível, mas outra coisa que também não é deixada de lado são as trilhas sonoras, perfeitas. dá vontade de ficar parado só ouvindo a sound track desse jogo as vezes
os puzzles também muito bem feitos e complexos do jeito que deveria ser. me rendeu vários wallpapers

The best part of Manifold Garden is just exploring the beautiful infinitely tiled environments. I was always excited to see what area would come next!

As a puzzle game, it's in a bit of a strange position - the hardest puzzle is usually just navigating the environment. The actual block puzzles tend to be pretty easy for most of the game, and can sometimes feel kind of like a distraction. But they do make good use of Manifold Garden's mechanics, especially towards the end of the game (and in the optional achievement challenge run).

Cool first-person puzzler with nice visuals and ambience. The puzzle gameplay is fairly standard and logical, it’s not quite as clearly level-based as Portal or Talos but for the most part, finding the goal and pieces of each puzzle is not hard which is the approach I prefer with puzzle games. The quality is pretty good but I wouldn’t have minded some more difficult or satisfying puzzle designs, or just more in general. I had a great time but it only lasts a few hours.

The visuals are great, the style feels like an extension of what you see in Antichamber except instead of being confined to small corridors, the levels are massively open and infinitely repeating. This gives a great sense of scale but I’ll admit that with no real weight or a potential loss state, the game doesn’t really capitalise on this ambience. Portal 2 has a much smaller scale but the massive falls feel much more significant and immersive rather than just being a cool idea like in this game.

The story kind of matches the style in that it’s vague and without narrative. There are some abstract ideas but I don’t think it’s supposed to be very meaningful. Maybe I just missed the point. Anyway it’s still a good choice for puzzle fans but maybe a little overpriced at full price since there isn’t a huge amount of content.

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.

I may give this one another go in the future but the physics puzzles while tied together nicely were not the most entertaining. A little clunky in execution.

Edit:

Got a little further this time around but I dunno. Some of the trippy visuals are neat, but the puzzles haven’t gotten too much better and there’s still nothing too solid keeping me wanting to explore because of how simple it looks. Some beautiful fractalish designs but I just don’t think I can get all the way through.