Manifold Garden

Manifold Garden is a first person puzzler that is excellent on two levels, as an actual collection of puzzles but also by being a game that is stunning to look at.

The game is based around the concept that you can control the direction of gravity by touching the wall you want. This combines in the game with various puzzles with blocks, water streams to ativate windmills and falling through the level (because of its infinite mirror design). The solutions often take more than a couple of steps, but are easy to perform. Because of the way the world works you often need to think a bit outside the box, but the solutions are all very logical and satisfying to reach. I only needed a walkthrough in very few occasional spots, meaning that for me it really delivered the optimal difficulty.

The levels are truely designed like mirrors, that repeat endlessly. This means that falling through the floor will make you see the same level from above, and the objects in each "world" always remain in the same position. The game offers a very minimalistic, colourful and striking artstyle, and it can be really beautiful to look at in certain places. Its got very elegant and surrealistic design, making it a very memorable experience.

The game took about 4 to 5 hours to beat, but due to its unique puzzles and visuals it lasts a much longer impression. Definitly one of the best puzzle games I have ever played.

Spatial game in which you need to rotate the world to solve puzzles. The rotation itself occurs by pressing a button when you stand close to the wall that you want to make your future floor. The visual feature of the game is the levels made with the effect of an infinite mirror, i.e. if you jump down from the edge, you can fall indefinitely until you land on the same level. The levels in the game are large, but this feature makes them simply huge, so 99% of the time you have to move here with the run button held down. The same jumping down and landing to the desired point helps to quickly move around the level, but people with a fear of heights (like me for example) will not feel very comfortable: the first third of the game was really breathtaking for me. The puzzles here are divided mainly into three types, which are constantly mixed with each other in different proportions: place special cubes in the right places, direct water into a water mill or send a signal through huge platforms. All these objects (cubes, water and platforms) are subject to the rotation of the world. So the cubes are tied only to one or a maximum of two directions and you cannot take them from the other, the water also flows only when you are in that turn of the world in which it can physically flow (in other cases it freezes and you can walk along it like on a bridge), large platforms are subject to rotational gravity and will fall downward. The balance of difficulty in the game, as for me, is ideal: it is not very easy for you to get bored, but also not very difficult to break your head. But I can point out the following: puzzles with cubes are interesting, but still a little boring, I really liked the puzzles with water and they are cool, puzzles with platforms are more difficult and more tedious. The game has its own distinctive visual style, but I can't call it outstanding, but yes, the levels look beautiful here, mainly due to the play of geometric shapes and their mirroring. I can safely and definitely recommend the game to lovers of spatial puzzles and carefully to people who like to think and have a good vestibular apparatus (I think it is very easy to catch motion sickness here).