Some games can be described in a single screenshot. A mass of bean people jutting through a foam door, a space marine holding a pistol on a ringworld, falling blocks against a Russian backdrop. Manifold Garden will certainly arrest an onlooker's attention in a single image, but an entire artbook wouldn't be enough to truly get to the heart of this surreal first-person puzzler. Infinite staircases, warping platforms, and off-kilter buildings dot this landscape where gravity is just a suggestion and answers are always just out of reach. Crafted over seven years by creator William Chyr and a small team of developers, Manifold Garden challenges everything players understand about first-person puzzlers, and maybe physics as well.
While Manifold Garden may not be easily describable, it certainly has a distinctive look. The entire world is full of floating impossible structures that go on forever. If a player were to fall off, they can land on the next structure below, and it will be an exact duplicate of the one they left. Between that and the inability for the player to jump, puzzles are full of navigation that seems straightforward until someone actually tries it. On top of everything, players are left on their own throughout the experience, forced to figure out the way forward via environmental context at all turns.
There is one more tool in the player's arsenal. Manifold Garden's main gameplay mechanic involves shifting gravity to make walls and ceilings the floor. As long as they're standing against a surface, players can rotate the room and keep walking. In puzzle rooms, this gives the player access to out of reach buttons, activates cubes that are only movable with a certain configuration, and sets up all sorts of mind-bending scenarios. In the hub world between puzzles, it simply allows for thrilling leaps of faith onto far off buildings.
In a way, Manifold Garden is the gaming equivalent of a book of crossword puzzles, only half the words are in a new language. Progress is slow going even in short play sessions just due to the sheer number of elements players have to figure out from scratch. The satisfaction of getting to the next room is always quite potent, but the game certainly learns from its inspirations, ramping up the complexity from Antichamber and The Witness. It's a lot to take in at once, which makes it suffer in comparison to games with a singular puzzle element to focus on.
Whereas the original batch of games stemming from Portal could be relaxing in their own way, games like Manifold Garden combine complex, unfamiliar environments with fidgety controls. While it's perfectly logical considering the gravity-shifting mechanics, the lack of a jump button really makes the controls feel unnatural. There's just something about that exclusion that blocks off the world from feeling immersive.
Thankfully, the visuals do pick up the slack quite a bit from the obtuse movement. Manifold Garden is a beautiful game that looks like nothing else out there. Survey each new area for challenges to take on reveals unique beauty and intricate detail. The designs get so much out of a limited color palette, playing with shades of different colors not already taken by the gravity mechanic to produce so many unique environments. It seems like it'd be easy to get lost in an environment designed to stretch forever in all directions, but each room subtly pushes players towards their next goal, even if it's not obvious right from the start.
In that beauty, Manifold Garden finds its purpose. Moreso than a lot of games, this is an art piece, an achievement to be admired. Completing puzzles and unlocking the various ways the game plays with its central mechanic all provide the catharsis of truly understanding each new environment and admiring the clever ways the developer wrapped everything together. From a pure gameplay perspective, it's a bit clunky, but you could say that about the work of many of the great artists and composers. Manifold Garden may not be much of a game, but it's surely an adventure that's worthy of some attention.
Manifold Garden is available now on PC via Epic Games Store, Apple Arcade, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch. ScreenRant was provided an Xbox One code for the purposes of this review.