Manifold Garden (PlayStation 5)
Official GBAtemp Review
Product Information:
- Release Date (NA): May 20, 2021
- Release Date (EU): May 20, 2021
- Publisher: William Chyr Studio
- Developer: William Chyr Studio
- Genres: FPS Puzzler
- Also For: Computer, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S
Game Features:
When M. C. Esher created his physics bending lithograph "Relativity", I doubt he ever envisaged being able to experience the thrills of traversing walls, ceilings and infinitely repeating spaces in vivid 4k 60fps glory. To be fair, the artist only lived until 1972 so the entire concept of a PlayStation console would have blown his mind, in much the same way Manifold Garden takes his concepts and brings us a living, breathing mind-melting puzzler experience. Manifold Garden originally graced the world in October 2018, and ever since then, players have been banging their heads in frustration on every traversable surface, in an attempt to understand the simple yet complex physics-based world of the Manifold. With PlayStation 5 being the new kid on the block, William Chyr Studio have seen fit to grant us a free upgrade, and show us exactly how they envisioned their creation running on this generation's hardware.
Firing up the game, you get a hint of the scale of this title. Everything is an illusion, everything is visually intriguing and everything is your playground. When I began, I thought it would be a walk in the park and just take a while to get to grips with its core pillar gameplay, but how wrong I was. Manifold Garden takes everything you think you know and turns it on its head, side, bottom and inverts it into oblivion. Developed in Unity, there is a definite Unity feel to this game, a certain look to it that shouts puzzler. Each orientation is depicted by your pointer and the overall environment's colour scheme changes to a specific colour. For example, you may be walking around a red-carpeted hallway with white walls and pillars, but point your white dot reticle at it and it turns blue, then tapping L2 next to that pillar shifts the gravity until that becomes the surface you'll be walking on and everything changes to shades of blue to match. pointing back at the previous surface you were walking on, which now looks like the wall versus the floor you are now standing on, and the reticle changes to red, and tapping L2 to transition back to that surface then turns everything back to shades of red and the world is back to feeling somewhat normal. It's a very visceral experience, and the colours involve red, blue, green, yellow, purple, and orange to denote the 6 surfaces of a cube, internally or externally.
To make things more complicated, when you are outside of a room, in the outdoors, if you look around you see a multiverse of versions of your current environment. This means that if you take a leap of faith off the building you're standing on, you will fall back down onto the roof of that very same building you were just standing on, which is both insanely clever and incredibly unnerving. An added layer of complexity to this formula is that even though you think every environment is identical, sometimes something is slightly different, and it's up to you to explore every nook and cranny until you figure out the next direction to take in this mentally and physically challenging world.
The basics are as follows: traverse the levels, hit the switches, and solve the riddle of the place you find yourself exploring. It would be simple if it gave you any sense of direction and sometimes this is to the detriment of the experience. I often found myself taking note of a specific landmark or point of interest, such as a plinth that's missing a key block, a coloured tree, a hole in a wall with corrupted-looking textures, and then becoming entirely disoriented as to which surface I was on when I found that last thing that I now require in order to progress. One example of this is that the trees harbour fruit, or square-shaped "apples" as I called them, with arrows on them. But the arrows indicate the direction of gravity they require in order to manipulate them. You must then find the corresponding plinth in that colourway, in which to plug the block into in order to consider that riddle solved, and for something else to open up or change. If you grab a blue block and transition to a yellow surface the blue block becomes useless and non-interactive until you go back onto the blue surface. Does that make sense?
Some paths and solutions are glaringly obvious, and some seemed incredibly obtuse. For example, obtaining the first dark cube lead me to believe I had to backtrack miles to an area I hadn't yet searched. I simply assumed this was the key to some indicator I had spotted miles before, but infuriatingly, it wasn't. Reloading my save and turning around 180 degrees I spotted a pulsating effigy of the cube I was holding and happily trundled my ways across the map until I could plumb it into its designated area, thus triggering a celebratory cutscene. Other times I acted for the most obscene idea I had in my head to try to shatter the relatively zen atmosphere. In one place I noticed the environment was essentially a convex series of stepped surfaces encapsulated by a concave mirror of the map, effectively like I was walking on the surface of a ball within a ball, that all connected regardless of the direction you take. Understanding that you could be running forever and that it was a mere illusion; I decided that instead of acting rationally, I wanted to attempt to flip the gravity and try to fall/fly across the tessellated landscape until I hit the other side. Startlingly, this was the solution, it was a joyous moment of endorphins going wild, and the purest feeling of satisfaction that my unhinged unorthodox playstyle had actually been beneficial for once.
Often--honestly, far too often, I felt completely lost, with no sense of what I should do next, and no idea what was going on or which way to head. I found the game to be completely void of handholding, bar a couple of pulsating objects indicating something was in a certain direction, but everything was free form and up to me to discover. I cannot work out if this is a good thing or a bad thing. My personal experience of Manifold Garden is that I was entirely lost so many times I found it hard to want to come back to the same six surfaces in order to figure out what the heck I was going to do next. My method for getting back into it was to simply focus down on one surface at a time, one item of intrigue at a time, and force yourself to follow one puzzle through at a time per visit to the areas. You can always go back into those areas and re-visit things you spotted later on or in another playthrough. To date, I still have a number of questions regarding block plinths I didn't seem to use yet, and areas I feel that I never fully explored properly because of my baffled mindset.
Manifold Garden melted my brain, but sadly, doesn't melt my heart. It's a hugely enjoyable puzzle experience with a lot to offer and heaps to learn, but I think it takes a certain kind of player to really fall in love with the taxing nature of the exploration. It's smart, it's visceral, and it's all-encompassing, but I feel it could be more fun and less infuriatingly baffling. The PS5 feature-set of directional haptics and utterly gorgeous visuals don't quite set the world on fire, but Manifold Garden is absolutely an incredible experience nonetheless.
Verdict
- Incredibly clever architecture and physics
- Minimalist design choices and nice colour play
- Zero sense of direction at times
