Manifold Garden

Hmm, where to start with this one? Don't get me wrong, Manifold Garden is absolutely gorgeous when you first boot it up. The main mechanic is genuinely cool and rarely used in other games you basically control the 3D orientation of the entire world. Walking up to a wall, making it your new floor, and falling through a never-ending space of repeating structures is a trip. But "initially" is the keyword here. While the puzzles are fun at first, the magic fades pretty fast because the game is just way too abstract for my taste. I’m a lore and story guy. I love puzzlers, but I need a reason to care about the world I'm in. In this game, nothing is ever added in terms of world building, lore, or story as you progress. You're just solving puzzles in an infinite, sterile void. On top of that, not all the puzzles are actually fun to solve, and constantly shifting gravity around in a repeating void can get seriously disorienting after a while. If you just want pure, abstract spatial puzzles and don't care about a plot at all, you might really enjoy this. But for me, the mechanics alone just weren't enough to keep me interested. It looks amazing, but without any story or lore to anchor it, it just felt empty.