Manifold Garden

Very trippy, very beautiful, clever puzzles. Each time a new space is entered, it's infiniteness is accompanied by the swell of this music that gave me such a sense of awe.

I've played this game for a lot longer than four hours. Because I’ve mostly been playing in offline mode, Steam hasn’t counted the 18 hours shown by the in-game counter. And that may be the best indicator of whether Manifold Garden is any good: I kept coming back to it. It definitely is good - if, and only if, you’re prepared to stick with it. Unfortunately, Manifold Garden isn’t especially welcoming to new players. Most of the puzzles aren’t that difficult compared with something like The Witness. What makes it difficult, and sometimes frustrating, is the developer’s reluctance to give the player even a small amount of guidance about what they’re supposed to be doing. Later in the game, you start to get a feel for how its puzzles tend to work. I’m near the end now, and many of the puzzles are variations on things you’ve already seen, but on a much bigger scale. If you can get through the initial confusion and stick with it, Manifold Garden becomes rather lovely. You get plenty of those satisfying “aha” moments as you work out how a particular mechanism is meant to function - the same kind of feeling you get from games like The Witness or The Talos Principle. If you enjoy those games, and you’re prepared to persevere through the early stages, Manifold Garden is well worth buying.

Absolutely incredible to play and visually stunning. If you love architechture definitely check this out. If you loved Monument Velley, this is the grown up 3D version you will obsess over.