Manifold Garden’s main standby is the “block and button” puzzle, where you have to place something in a certain spot in order to make progress appear, but that’s not all that it has up its sleeve. There is such a wide variety of ways for a puzzle game to stump you and make you think. TwistĪs a puzzler, we of course have to talk about the form that the puzzles of the game come in. While I won’t give things away, the end of the game is something of a trip, but it’s a sight to behold and I wasn’t personally disappointed. There wasn’t a strong story thread that was pulling me along, but rather my own curiosity and desire to see more of what the game had to offer. It’s all very dreamlike in a way that I really liked. There were fountain-like structures and blocky trees that grew keys to puzzles on them. At first I wasn’t sure why exactly it was being called a garden considering the hallways that I was moving through, but as things opened up it became more obvious to me. In some ways, Manifold Garden reminds me a lot of that, though the focus here is much more in puzzle solving rather than in platforming.ĭespite this being a game that doesn’t have an intensely visible story, the setting of the garden is still interesting in its own right. I covered something in the same vein with the platformer 140 earlier this year. Yes, there might be a story there, but it is more likely to be a background element or be more up to interpretation by the player. Manifold Garden is one of those titles that I like to call an “experience game,” a game in which the focus is on the harmony between the gameplay and the visuals, with story being of a lower priority. I was eager to try out Spiritfarer after waiting eagerly for it, but instead I ended up getting sidetracked on the way there and sucked into the mind-bending reality of Manifold Garden. I think that I was just as shocked as everyone else to see just how many games were “coming later today.” Normally, I am not surprised to see one or two of these, but the vast list was exciting. Like many others, I was watching the Nintendo Indie World Showcase this past week and was taking in everything that was coming up. This culminates in cultivating a garden to open new paths forward, where an eternal expanse awaits.Introducing: Manifold Garden Switch Review As you develop an instinct for navigating the world, Manifold Garden becomes a grand architectural landscape you can not only explore but master. To begin with, you will be constantly wondering "what just happened". This not only makes it mind-bending to explore but allows you to manipulate this repetition to make impossible jumps by repeatedly falling. The worlds are not as big as they first appear as they are constructed of repeating elements. This sets up a basic puzzle challenge of geometry, gravity, doors and buttons.Īfter an hour or so, the game opens up and makes it clear that the architecture is in fact the real puzzle. Each of these surfaces is colour coded and you can only interact with objects of the corresponding colour. You are basically turning walls into floors. You soon discover that you can walk up to any surface and press a button to change gravity to that plane. It takes time to master and enjoy, but with patience and effort offers an experience like encountering an ancient cathedral. You play from a first-person perspective and explore a beautiful, and what seems to be an abstract world, bereft of colour. Manifold Garden is inspired by Escher drawings and the reality-bending moments in the film Inception.
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