Manifold Garden E3 Hands On Impressions

Manifold Garden a first-person exploration puzzle game unlike anything you’ve ever experienced. Forget everything you know about gravity before playing this game. You’ll use a mechanic to turn walls into floors in order to help you solve puzzles.

The concept is simple. Find a way to continue forward through the levels. Certain rooms will contain doors that need to be opened. Usually by pushing a color coordinated switch in order to activate the aforementioned doors. Rooms will have you moving cubes from various areas on the floor and/or walls in order to open each door allowing you to continue on your way. Puzzles start out simple enough but quickly ramp up the difficulty. It will take every part of your brain working together in order to figure out how to get a cube on the “wall” on one side of the room onto the “floor” in order for you to continue on your way. Once you exit the interior and step foot outside things get even crazier. The same gravity manipulation mechanics are in place here but flipping the world the wrong way can send you flying off a ledge into a freefall.

Once you start falling your movement is limited but you’ll soon notice that all around you are identical locations to the one you just fell off. Landing on any of them will enable you to continue on your way. Once landing you can figure out what went wrong and try another way to complete the puzzle. You’ll end up flying off multiple times as you attempt to solve each puzzle, but in no time at all you’ll figure out the mechanics and begin solving puzzles at a regular pace.

There is a lot to digest in this demo and we won’t know until we have the full game in our hands how hard the puzzles really get, but at this point it is safe to say there is nothing else quite like Manifold Garden on the market to date.