Manifold Garden's architectural puzzles are now on Steam and Itch
Up and up and up and up...
Are you lost, readers? I've only wandered briefly through Manifold Garden's recursive puzzle labyrinths, but I'm afraid to say I am too. Oh, well, at least it's a gorgeous place to find yourself stuck in. If you're better at thinking your way out of a tight spot, you might even find yourself breezing through William Chyr's beautiful void, with Manifold Garden finding a new home on Steam and Itch today.
Okay, yes, it's been on the Epic Games Store for the past year too.
A years-long passion project from Chyr, Manifold Garden is a 3D puzzler about a world that's shifting and rotating all around you. While it's quite a neat puzzler in terms of how it plays with perspective and gravity, the real draw is in the worlds you're brain-teasing your way through. See, Manifold Garden's worlds are massive, infinitely terrifying, recursively folding in and across themselves while you finagle your way through their labyrinthine chambers. It's a hell of a thing to look at, and screenshotting any moment of gameplay practically guarantees a new desktop wallpaper.
Alice Bell might've reckoned it more a horror game than puzzler in her Manifold Garden review, and that it maybe wears out its welcome a little too soon. Even so, she had to concede that it is indeed quite a stunner.
"Manifold Garden is beautiful. It’s also one of a few ‘you’re on the wall now lol’ games that makes me marvel at the skill they must require to design. Making a puzzle that needs you to think in a lot of different dimensions must require the ability to think in even more dimensions to dream up. Still, the challenges so start to get a bit rote after a while, with perhaps too much time left in between new things being introduced."
Manifold Garden is out now on Steam and Itch with a 20% launch discount 'til October 27th, at £12.79/€12.79/$15.99.