Manifold Garden, An Incredibly Pretty Puzzle Game

Hello, my name is Nathan Grayson, and I have a broken brain. Manifold Garden broke my brain.

Manifold Garden is a PS4 first-person puzzle game based on M.C. Escher’s famed piece, Relativity (it was even called Relativity before a recent re-reveal). What this means at first blush: it looks damn cool. What this means for the game: it’s got mind-obliterating puzzles for days.

Or years, actually. During a PSX demo, creator William Chyr explained that Manifold Garden is an exploration of 400 years of physics discoveries. You begin with gravity shifting, but before long you’re out and about in an Escher wet dream that infinitely wraps around itself. If you fall off a platform, you’ll just keep falling until… you’re back on that platform. Like this:

Or, in more practical terms, this:

Watch Chyr walk me through the game here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbCRtpDqDeA

Chyr himself has backgrounds in installation art and nuclear physics, so I guess it kinda makes sense that he’d end up making video games. OK, no it doesn’t, but it’s still rad that he is.

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