Fairy Tale Spotlight: Manifold Garden

Manifold Garden is an indie video game by William Chyr Studio that came out about a week ago in October 2020. I had been sort of watching it for a couple of years and was pretty much ready to sink my teeth into it the day it was released. It is a first person puzzle game based around the idea of fractals and Non-Euclidean geometry. I eat this sort of stuff up.

The game doesn't really have a story or plot, although my own mind was coming up with its own story as I played it. You are dropped into a massive universe based around ideas and physics that shouldn't really exist in the real world. You have stairs going the wrong way or even sideways sometimes. In most areas, the world appears to repeat into infinity.

You are given the much needed ability to switch which way gravity falls whenever you come across a wall. Much of the world looks a lot like a M.C. Escher painting, so that ability makes it possible to actually circumvent the insane environments.

The repeating aspect of the game is actually because the game has fractals in mind. Explained far too simply, a fractal is an object or image that is repeated on itself infinitely. Where what this game has is perhaps not exactly a fractal world, it gets pretty close to the idea. It forces you to think of those copies out in the distance as the same as where you're standing. And likewise, if I fall in their direction, I am actually just falling to where I was.

The basic premise of the game seems one of renewal and the ridding of corruptions. Along the way, the game taught me a few tricks, and I have to continually play by its rules. Like most of these first person puzzlers, it mostly is about the manipulation of cube-shaped blocks, but it is done in such a solid way. I was never bothered by how it, like everyone else, borrows from Portal.

It takes a lot of imagination to understand this game. Without it, you are liable to get confused or even bored. M.C. Escher created paintings that made no sense, but when you look at them... you still want to go there and explore the strange worlds he made. We can see ourselves walking those impossible stairways and roaming the halls, but in reality it would be impossible. Manifold Garden makes it possible because the people made it had the imagination to make it that way.

Manifold Garden is solid and polished. I encountered no bugs along the way. I was thrilled by its presentation and enjoyed solving all of the puzzles to the very ending. I recommend this game wholeheartedly.

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