4/5 ★ – sirreldar's review of Manifold Garden.

Manifold Garden is a pure puzzle game with two major mechanics. The first is that gravity can be turned in any of the 6 directions, causing the player character and some objects to fall with the new orientation. The second is that the world wraps, often in all 3 dimensions. These two major mechanics work together in fantastic ways throughout the game, and really encourage unique thinking and problem solving. Additional minor mechanics are gradually introduced at a good pace and combine and interact with each other in fun and interesting ways. The world itself was a ton of fun to explore. The M. C. Escher-ian architecture was interesting and engaging. Stairs on the ceiling eventually became stairs on the floor (or maybe you are simply walking on the ceiling?), pillars became bridges, doorways became trapdoors, bridges became walls. Every re-orientation of the world and its gravity completely changes the space and the player’s ability to navigate it. The visuals were mostly minimalistic, but well-executed and enjoyable. A black-and-white theme was common throughout, but contrasted with occasional extreme bursts of psychedelic colors. Surfaces were color-coded to match the orientation of gravity, providing a very welcome at-a-glance indicator for which way is “up”. The puzzles were quite well-paced and none of them felt unreasonably tricky or challenging. For me, the hardest part of the puzzles was identifying and remembering the rules and tools of the game, and using them to conquer each area. I often caught myself forgetting to “think with portals”. I do have two small criticisms (or maybe one criticism and an observation). The first was the absence of music for long stretches of the game. Music was present here and there, and when it was present it was quite good, generally contributing to the overall theme and ambiance of the game. However the music would very often inexplicably fade away and leave me in stark silence for minutes at a time. Maybe this would have been less bothersome (or even less noticeable) to me if I wasn’t streaming, but I eventually just muted the occasional in-game music and played my own background music, which was a bummer. Secondly, the game lacked any real narration or explicit story… even any type of implicit lore or world-building was conspicuously missing. This was likely intentional, but I would have appreciated even a small morsel of exposition, or narration, or really anything to even superficially explain our presence in this physics-and-other-laws-defying world. As is, it feels much like wandering aimlessly through a trippy dream, looking for something new. Admittedly, I do believe this was intentional, and if that was their goal in this design then it was spot on. So again, this is not a criticism per se, but I caught myself reducing the game in my mind to just a series of puzzles in a strange world, which I didn’t like. Overall, I would very highly recommend Manifold Garden to anyone that enjoys a good puzzle game and enjoys learning and mastering rules and tools and combining them to accomplish specific goals. One small word of warning though, that the constant rotation and falling through the world occasionally gave me a small touch of dizziness, something I virtually never experience. If you are prone to motion sickness it will likely be unplayable for you.