Manifold Garden

I had higher hopes for Manifold Garden. The trailer video for it was beautiful, and even playing it, the surreal geometry stretching to infinity was stunning. Still, I value games for their gameplay. Perhaps their story, to some extent, but the visuals are not all that important in the end. Manifold Garden is a puzzle game first and foremost, and I think it isn't quite that great at it.

The main themes of the game are gravity shifting (choosing which of the 6 sides is "down"), and circular dimensions (if you go far enough in a direction, you are back where you started, generally achieved by falling and landing on the roof or crossing a small gap), with a pinch of other non-Euclidean geometry. Using this gravity manipulation, you must cleverly place cubes, which retain their gravity direction in spite of you, and solve various puzzles with them. There's also some other elements, moreso towards the later half of the game, but the essence remains the same.

While not trivial, I didn't feel the puzzles were all that difficult, nor were they particularly exciting. After experiencing each mechanic once, and saying "cool" out loud, that was kind of it. I feel like I generally spent more time solving the puzzles than thinking about their solutions, which isn't a good outlook for a puzzle game. The infinite spaces were cool to look at, but then a lot of the game was also set indoors. I'd say that defeated the point, but there wasn't much point to the infinity anyways aside from visuals, and occasionally acting like a portal from the floor to the ceiling / wall.

Overall, a fancy looking puzzle game, which is only a few hours long, and even at that short length feels a bit padded out. I could maybe recommend it as a polished introductory puzzle game, but it just didn't feel fun, interesting, or challenging to play. So I can't recommend it on a personal level.