“Manifold Garden” Review: Geometric Solitude
I’m dropped into a nondescript area. Tutorials pop up. I’m changing which direction the floor is, walking on the ceiling. Cool, I think, a manipulation puzzle game. Everything is intuitive. Gamer brain sees switch. Press switch, door opens, go forth. I walk on the wall, on the windows. My footsteps sound like dreamy xylophones. I smile. I think nothing of the outside past the window.
It’s not long before I come to a tree, growing colorful, square fruit. I plant its fruit in a nearby console, opening a nearby door and triggering a crescendo in the game’s eerily beautiful soundtrack (composed by Laryssa Okada). It leads, not to another room, but outside. And outside is where things get wild.
Manifold Garden (William Chyr Studio) makes itself accessible to a broad stroke of players by, initially, confounding long-time gamers. Generally, Gamer Brain knows that if player go off cliff, player dies and goes back to checkpoint. Edges bad. Restarting bad. But when players step off the edge in Manifold Garden, they are dropped into a closed loop of geometry, seemingly infinite as players watch the same structures fly by over and over again. The wind whips past, the perspective drops (you are “falling,” after all), but blessedly, it is not as nauseating as other long falls in games. Plus, by just moving forward midair as they would on the ground, players can maneuver this endless freefall, finding themselves at the other end of the once-insurmountable gap. It was at this point that I let out an audible giggle of accomplishment as I played. I, and others, have mastered an important tool in an ever-growing set.
Now, I enjoy progress in games. I enjoy moving fast, getting to the next area, completing things, checking off my objective lists. Manifold Garden neither begs nor asks to be savored, it demands it. I found myself doing the gameplay equivalent of walking into each new space, swiveling my perspective all over to see what fresh geometric wonder towered before me. My finger would often slip, or, while I’m thinking of what to do in a space, hit the Photo Mode button. And every single time, no matter where I was, or what I was looking at, I genuinely thought, “Yes. This would look beautiful on my wall,” even before playing around with the myriad filter and finetuning options. William Chyr has managed to make more than an aesthetically pleasing game. He has made an interactive art collection whose stills that could fill galleries with ease.
Enough cannot be said about Laryssa Okada’s work on the soundtrack, equal parts inexplicable, beautiful, and (when it needs to be) haunting. More, beyond your footsteps and the rush of wind as you fall from place to place, there can be very little going on in the soundscape. Okada’s composition fills in the gaps, painting within the thousands of lines Chyr has placed on the ever-shifting campus, giving a radiance and character to the technically inhuman space you’re exploring. Whether it is setting a tone, serving as ambience, or elevating the architecture around you, the music more than pulls its weight amongst the grandeur of its setting.
This shouldn’t diminish Martin Kvale’s sound design throughout the experience. In a seemingly infinite landscape, the sounds echo, reverberate, shake the world around you, both complimenting and standing apart from Okada’s score. The most salient example is when the Garden sounded like it was crashing and shaking around me. I was genuinely scared (even after finding the source), and that is solely due to Kvale’s work.
What otherwise caught me about this experience was its true, stifling sense of solitude. Not loneliness, not isolation…but solitude. It is just you in the Garden, as it seems it was meant to be. And as much I love the tropes elsewhere, there is no hostile AI guiding you room to room, no mysterious director providing in-game advice, there isn’t even a plot to explain why you’re at the Garden. There is only you and the Garden, and it presents a comforting, if largely unfamiliar, sense of peace.
The beauty of Manifold Garden, especially when it comes to newer or less experienced gamers, is that it does not demand reflexes or quick thinking to progress, nor does that detract from the satisfaction of solving its puzzles. Much as I love Portal and the like, I could see how people would be frustrated by missing a mid-launch portal placement necessary to progress. While some games, puzzle or otherwise, may require quick thinking and quicker reflexes, Manifold Garden is about planning and foresight. And like any good puzzle or brainteaser, the feeling of triumph when you see the solution in your mind’s eye is there, and just as satisfying as ever.
Though devoid of a traditional plot or story structure, Manifold Garden still holds a unique sense of accomplishment outside of solving puzzles. Early puzzles have players picking fruit and using them to open doors via switches, but in time, players will be redirecting water, growing trees, bringing a sense of order and beauty to clusters of chaos that seemingly threaten the Escheresque landscapes. You are not just progressing through a series of puzzles. You are having an impact. You are changing the world around you, giving life, making it better by being there. Even in a digital landscape, that counts for something.
Manifold Garden is so many things at once: beautiful, haunting, challenging, calming, impossible, accessible, all in a beautifully wrapped experience. This is for anyone who enjoys puzzles, art, architecture, or just meandering around a garden. Just be loose with your definition of “garden.”
