Played through Manifold Garden over a few days this week. It’s extremely gorgeous and sort of touches on the same transcendent mathematical experience that Mirror Drop or HyperRogue gave me the first time I played them.
Its main gimmick is seamless looping 3D spaces. It’s hard to capture the scale of these in static screenshots, but it’ll at least give you a taste:
The music in the game is typically sparse, but will build up in suitably awe-inspiring locations. The sound effects are very crisp and help ground the player and objects in the world. Everything has a slight echo to try to approximate the soundscape of the infinite room you’re in. Your footsteps and all the thumps and clanks and tinks of collisions are very satisfying.
It’s ostensibly a puzzle game. The puzzles do ramp up a bit over the course of the game, but I never found them to be all that tricky. However, they are a wonderful excuse for the player to interact with infinity.
You largely navigate through the world by manipulating gravity. If you approach a surface, you can press a button to orient gravity towards that surface. Since most rooms repeat infinitely in at least one direction, the fastest way to move somewhere is normally to fall to the copy below you. This falling is breathtaking, and never got old. The audio design here really shines; the sound of the air swells around you as you pick up speed, and you get an extremely satisfying WHOOSH when you nearly miss a platform.
It’s a little short; I think I beat it within 4 hours. There are secrets, but they’re unfinished and a little buggy. Figuring out and navigating the secret path is quite a bit harder than anything the game has you do on the main path, and navigating some of them takes excruciating amounts of time. This all adds to an effect that makes it feel like you’re breaking the game, but I’m not sure if the tedium is worth it. I hope he fixes some of the bugs and fleshes out the secrets more in a future patch.
Despite being short, the game certainly worked its way into my psyche. I sleepwalk occasionally, and my most recent episode I imagined I dropped something behind my bed (which is sort of a recurring anxious sleepwalking theme for me). This time, instead of frantically grasping behind my bed, I looked up, fully expecting the object to loop around and fall out of my ceiling.