At Sony’s E3 booth, there were a multitude of smaller titles showcased on a single system each, but one of the ones that consistently drew the biggest audience had to be Manifold Garden, a striking first person 3D puzzle game coming to PS4 and PC from William Chyr.
The game is primarily inspired by the works of Christopher Nolan – specifically the dream sequences from Inception, as well as the bookcases from Intersteller. However, the visuals are influenced by architectural designs, along with a dash of Escher. It appears almost as a 3D stylised architectural plan itself. Cel-shaded but uses colour sparsely, to highlight certain areas.
Chyr describes the gameplay as inspired by the evolution of physics. We start with learning how to shift gravity, as hitting R2 on the PS4 controller allows you to walk on a wall and change the direction of gravity. Sometimes, this shift in gravity affects everything in the world, but in the early stages, only certain objects are affected by gravity on surfaces they’re attached to – this is indicated by colour coding. A green cube on the green floor of a room can only be picked up if you’re walking on that surface, while the same goes for a purple cube that may be attached the wall. You have to work out how to manoeuvre between surfaces and manipulate objects to progress.
As you emerge from the initial rooms, you exit outside to find that there are many more structures and mazes in the distance, that seem to stretch out infinitely. That’s not entirely true, in fact this infinity does repeat itself and loop back in on itself – if you drop a cube off a ledge into the abyss below you, it will eventually fall from above you, curving through space-time. Learning how this repetition works is key to some of the more advanced puzzles in the game.
One instance of this involves a complex, infinitely repeating series of staircases descending down upon each other. You can run along them and down them as much as you want, but you will never find the exit. Looking up reveals a distant ceiling with a similar staircase-upon-staircase structure, but with exits dotted along. But how do you get up there? The answer involves shifting gravity a couple of times in your favour, and then using what you know about the looping environment – literallly jumping the gap between floor and ceiling. You don’t make it immediately, but your inertia combined with the repeating environment mean you’ll land eventually, and are able to progress. It’s a real head trip.
Chyr’s been at work on this for about 3.5 years, and still has a way to go, but the game is looking very solid at this stage. There’s imagination to spare in both the design of puzzles and the visual design of the unique world of Manifold Garden, and it’s sure to make heads spin when it’s eventually released on PS4 and PC platforms.
