Manifold Garden is one stylish Escher-inspired puzzler
What's up?
Manifold Garden's latest trailer bests Antichamber as the most M.C. Escher-inspired video game I've seen. Set in a world where the player manipulates gravity on one of six axis, you decide how to navigate this omnidirectional world by tilting it around like a box.
"The original prototype was based on the M.C. Escher print Relativity and just involved changing gravity to walk on walls. The game is so much more than that now," developer William Chyr explained on the PlayStation Blog. "We've added a ton of new mechanics, and the game is now really about exploring architecture and consequences in a world where physics is turned upside down."
Manifold Garden also uses the old "screenwrap" idea where going to the right side of the screen makes you come out the left, only applies it to a 3D space. So if you drop a cube into the ether it will also fall from the sky.
Just because the world is full of geometric shapes doesn't mean it's entirely sterile either. You'll be able to plant trees with cubes and creating endless streams of water to grow said trees will be part of the challenge in this abstract menagerie.
Interestingly, this won't be a level by level affair as Chyr teased that all the environments will be connected in some way. "A lot of the levels blend together, and the puzzles are embedded within one another and connected in a multitude of ways, so it's hard to give an actual 'count' of how many there are," the developer said of its structure.
Manifold Garden has been in the works for a couple of years now and the full game will be released in 2016 on PC, Mac, Linux and PS4.
