Manifold Garden (2020) [Switch]

Overhead the albatross hangs motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves in labyrinths of coral caves
The echo of a distant tide
Comes willowing across the sand
And everything is green and submarine

–Echoes, Pink Floyd

If M.C. Escher, Jack Kirby, and 2001: A Space Odyssey had a baby, that’d be weird. In many ways, Manifold Garden is not quite so weird. It’s more like your own personal Heaven. Or your own personal Hell. It’s an unlimited cage, the size of the ever-expanding universe trapping you within its deliberate microcosms. Your take on its dreamscapes depends dramatically on how much you enjoy cerebral, explorative puzzle-solving in perfect solitude.

Manifold Garden plops you in the middle of its tesseract with little direction and no sense of a goal, your only purpose to make sense of your surroundings and your limited range of abilities. Just hope your mom or dad doesn’t want into the room and ask “Are ya winning, son?” “Now’s not the time, dad!!”

Heaven or Hell?

Your player avatar can shift gravity by approaching a nearby right angle, turning to walk on walls, and turning again to walk on ceilings. Any of the six faces of the cube are represented in Manifold Garden’s impressive architecture, surreal in its simultaneous dedication and resistance to realism. Navigating its structures in this manner, you’ll come to realize that Manifold Garden is a clever three-dimensional puzzle based around cubes. It’s not necessarily that you’ll be pushing cubes along tracks to open doors (breathe a sigh of relief here), but cubes will grow on trees, cubes will serve as keys, cubes will activate and unlock all sorts of mechanisms: fountains, pathways, reality itself.

“Mind-bending” is a buzzphrase that gets thrown around a lot but it’s not since Super Mario Galaxy’s distillation of space-gravity into 3D platforming that I’ve felt that buzzphrase was appropriate. Manifold Garden is mind-bending. I mean it bent my mind in the fullest, most allegorical sense of the word. Because Manifold Garden refuses to tell you its rules, your only choice is to rely on the barest human tools: the drive to explore, the ability to think outside of the box, the perception to take notice of even the remotest details.

Microcosm or Macrocosm?

I realized I needed to approach its puzzles (which are far more complex than “put this object here and you’re done”) by first getting a sense of the layout of the area and only then go about maneuvering the objects and items necessary to advance. But even then, getting a sense of the layout can be remarkably difficult. This is because of infinity.

Perhaps the greatest trick that Manifold Garden is going to throw at you is its dedication to the lemniscate: If you fall from a platform, you’ll plummet until you reach the very platform you fell from. In almost all of Manifold Garden’s areas, falling in any direction will result in you returning to your starting point. Players can take advantage of this infinity, along with the ability to shift gravity, to reach any facet or angle of any structure.

But good luck keeping your head on straight!

The 8-bit Review

Themes: 7/10

By the time I reached the end of Manifold Garden, I felt a really strange blend of emotions. I mean, there’s not really a story here, not one told with dialogue or characters, at least. But it’s as if the game boils down the archetypal journey into its simplest form. What you’re left with, as far as my interpretation goes, is the path from disorder to order, through isolation and solitude into the light. I think, if you let it, Manifold Garden communicates on an emotional level; it is as multi-faceted as its cubes, as its name implies.

 Visuals: 6/10

At first, Manifold Garden seems like it’s made up of nothing but simple lines and desaturated tones, but as you go on, its world of complex architecture and blends of color unfolds. The game is divided into multiple sections or areas, each representing a color. While there are no characters to speak of, Manifold Garden dazzles like a shower of polygonal fireworks. It’s downright surreal.

What.
#ManifoldGarden #NintendoSwitch pic.twitter.com/4t1xHDMa6c

— The Well-Red Mage (of course) (@theWellRedMage) August 24, 2020

 Audio: 5/10

Manifold Garden’s soundtrack is evocative and atmospheric, hollow, resonant, reverberating, like you’re in a massive steel cave and can hear the echoes of voices but not words. However, there’s not a lot of variety here. The music swells when it needs to in order to provide the necessary emotional kick, but I don’t think it’s too much to write home about. It serves its purpose.

 Gameplay: 8/10

What I love about Manifold Garden as a puzzle game is that it gives you a few very simple tools and abilities. You can shift gravity at right angles and you can pick up, move, and drop blocks. But you’ll be required to do this in a variety of ways, without relying on the easy lines of an isometric plane or grooves in which to push your cubes. You’ll have to think in unusual ways to proceed: envision ceilings as floors, waterfalls falling for eternity, growing trees on walls, and creating steps out of blocks. It forces you to be creative.

 Accessibility: 9/10

Because Manifold Garden provides you with so few techniques to navigate its mazes, I consider it highly accessible. All of the puzzles can be vanquished if given enough time to think them through.

 Challenge: 7/10

Manifold Garden stopped me in my tracks a handful of times. I had to put the game down and take some time away, then come back with fresh eyes to properly navigate specific puzzles. The trickiest ones are embedded in massive areas, making it difficult to get a sense of your surroundings, with multiple machines to active with multiple colored cubes. If you’re looking for a challenge, Manifold Garden packs a bit of a punch.

 Uniqueness: 7/10

I was delighted to discover that this wasn’t just another cube-pushing puzzler. It surprised me in more ways than one. For instance, it’s longer than I thought it would be.

Personal: 6/10

I’m glad I got to play Manifold Garden. Maybe my instincts are sharpening because when it was revealed in the Nintendo Switch indie showcase, it stood out to me somehow. It’s not as immediately appealing or flashy as a lot of other games, but if you’re a fan of puzzle games, you will probably enjoy its quick jaunt through dreams and nightmares.

Special thanks to William Chyr Studio for providing us with a copy of their game for this critique.

Aggregated Score: 6.9

Red formerly ran The Well-Red Mage and now serves The Pixels as founder, writer, editor, and podcaster. He has undertaken a seemingly endless crusade to talk about the games themselves in the midst of a culture obsessed with the latest controversy, scandal, and news cycle about harassment, toxicity, and negativity. Pick out his feathered cap on Twitter @thewellredmage, Mage Cast, or Story Mode.