When looked at up close, it can appear dull and barren, but a step back will often reveal the psychedelic beauty in greater patterns. Others are incredibly complex with moving parts in multiple directions. Some of the environments are simple, like a beautiful block tree with running water displays in a sort of Japanese garden aesthetic.

There are practically no textures to speak of and almost everything is made of simple polygons the environments are littered with stairs which seemingly go in every direction, whether or not you know that's what they are at the time. The music is minimal, though it builds in peak moments with intense synths which seem to mirror the environment. The aesthetics of Manifold Garden are confrontingly beautiful, in that they are both stark and complex. It’s in these moments where I felt like my power in this ever-changing space was growing, where the game made me feel like a master of my own domain. I began using cubes to hold various things in place, and even as steps for myself (even when it was unnecessary to solve an actual puzzle). The payoff for working it out, however, was not only immensely satisfying but helped open my mind for further puzzles. When I first approached this problem, it hadn’t previously occurred to me that this was even possible, and I was left stumped for ages. It had to be done in a specific way and sequence to take advantage of their individual gravities. There was one particularly devilish puzzle where I had to use several different cubes to hold a single, vital cube in place. Things that weren’t immediately obvious, like understanding that the gravity of one block can be used to stop another from falling in order to trigger a seemingly impossible switch, went from edge-of-the-brain concepts to be instinctual. Towards the end of the game, I could rapidly make these changes I could almost hear the click in my brain when everything started to become intuitive and second nature. I found that the more I came to understand the concepts, the less this happened, as my mind stopped fighting what it was seeing. It takes a while to adjust to the changes in orientation, so for the first few hours, I often found myself getting lost and even feeling a little nauseous and headachy (though it's worth noting that there are settings to adjust field-of-view, which helps). Add stairs going in different directions, switch combinations, and staggered environments, and even these relatively basic puzzles take some mind-bending to get accustomed to, which makes for further payoff when solutions come.

It doesn't take long to discover these colours are also relevant to their own personal gravity and as such, cubes can only be moved when the world is in that orientation. To start, there are colour-coded cubes which need to be placed on switches to open doors or other mechanisms. It is an Escher-inspired fever dream of a game-you have the ability to allocate gravity to any side of an environment at any time, and it's surprising just how many different puzzles the game manages to pull from this concept, with new elements gradually being introduced at just the right pace to grant further complexity without being completely daunting. Welcome to the Manifold Garden, a game where you need to prepare to have your mind warped by the beauty of repetition and some seriously impressive puzzles.

You stand in a room and the floor is the ceiling, or maybe it's the other way around? No, everything is the floor and you're falling through infinity.

Manifold garden falling gif