Manifold Garden is a first person puzzle game for PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and Playstation 4. Most first person puzzle games have a gimmick or two and Manifold Garden is no exception. One, there are six color coded cardinal directions (red, blue, yellow, orange, green, and purple) and you can step on to any wall by standing next to it and clicking on it. Two, every level is an infinitely looping 3D tiling of itself where traveling in one direction long enough will always bring you back to where you started from. From these two general rules come most of the games complexity.

If you have agoraphobia or a fear of heights this game might give you trouble. Portions of it are inside of tiny, cramped corridors but most of the game is endless heights and infinite corridors. It's not only possible to fall forever but it's common. At the start of the game I spent a lot of time just falling to get to places for the heck of it. When you aren't falling most levels are about carrying cubes from place to place, changing the paths of weird streams of water that want to flow in straight lines with said cubes, and generally trying to figure out how to get the cubes and streams from one place to another. Most of this is pretty stock for first person puzzle game but there are some quirks. You can't jump. Cubes are color coded and only move when you're in the right color/orientation. Falling is way faster than walking. All of this combines with exceedingly complicated level geometries to make for a moderately hard game. .

The aesthetic of this game is a weird blend of textural minimalism and geometric maximalism with a special emphasis on flat surfaces and right angles. Some structures are free floating, some are enclosed, but the most interesting are towers with no top and no bottom, walls and terraces which stretch to the left and right forever, structures that defy the concept of size. If you like fractals and art deco you'll probably really like the look of this game; huge and stark and angular. The music is fairly sparse as well but there are a few places where it comes in strong and works to emphasize the scale of the world. This game took me around eight hours to beat. It has some post game content that can stretch out past that for the masochistic completionists. It's available here.

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