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.
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.