Pekka
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http://manifold.garden/

Manifold Garden is a first person exploration and puzzle game. I originally posted about it in 2017, and now in 2019 it's released. Sometimes gamedev takes longer than expected.

https://twitter.com/ManifoldGarden

https://twitter.com/WilliamChyr/status/1185187505957691392

It's available from Apple Arcade and Epic Games for now.

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[Last edited by Pekka at 10-23-2019 10:50 AM : update after release news]

Pekka
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I was going to update the post when the game is released, and that has just happened. I edited the initial post and now I'll add this to bump the thread.

Here is a review. https://www.destructoid.com/review-manifold-garden-570159.phtml

ErikH2000
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

Rank Points: 2794
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My most awaited game right now. But do I want to sign up for Apple Arcade?

Why can't it just be on Steam.?

_Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

ErikH2000
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https://manifold.garden/

It got released to some more places including XBox One. (Woohoo! Couch gaming is better than desk gaming.) So now I've played it. I'm not all the way through but it has really lived up to the hype.

In fact, I'd say it's better than the press it's received. People are evaluating it as a game, which it definitely is. But it is also astounding interactive art.

Most of the enjoyment comes from taking in the "impossible geometry". One point in the world will repeat over vast distances. The building you see off in the distance is often the same building you are inside. Much like a room with mirrors on all walls, you are constantly fooled into feeling you're inside a very large space.

You can, and often must, fall for long moments with the world whipping by you, making progress towards some tiny little dot of a target miles away. And if you ever miss one of these targets, you can just let it come around again as you continue falling.

The comfort with falling is unintuitive at first. Of course, we don't like to fall in the physical world. But even in games, we associate falling with death, damage, or at the least, some loss of control over our intended path. By making falling a first-order action to take in the game and removing all penalties, the gentle and persistent message of the design is "things are okay". And it's a lovely counterbalance to the abstract and potentially overwhelming feel of this Escher-verse.

Go ahead and fall. Fall often. It's a good thing.

I had braced myself for a pretty game that isn't that fun to play. But the puzzles and experience design are first rate. William Chyr, the developer, has thoroughly considered the end result. The levels have gone through a ton of playtesting and been revised for feedback. There are many subtle touches that show thought towards the order that the player will see things in. Easier examples of behavior are shown before a more difficult puzzle using the behavior is presented. The puzzles often have lynchpin moments. By DROD standards, its probably a 6-brainer, though I am only 4 hours into the game, and it might get much harder.

There is an elegant constraint to your possible actions that is based on geometry. You can click any surface you're near and gravity will shift to make that surface the direction of falling. This would seem to allow you to go almost anywhere, but if the surface you want to reach doesn't have other surfaces that would allow traversal, it won't be possible. I say its an "elegant constraint" because a lesser game would rely on game elements that specifically allowed/disallowed traversal. In Manifold Garden, the obstacles are just implied by the shapes you walk on.

The visuals steal the show, but the sound is quite good too. Music is ambient, for the most part, but ties into things you are near or doing. For example, if you walk on a window from the inside of a building (gravity changes have you walking on windows often) there is a motif just for that activity. It will stop playing when you stop walking, and resume when you walk again - a subtle and playful touch. My favorite sound effect of the game is falling, which not only has the expected wind rush, but also the perturbations of nearby objects whisking by you.

This is an excellent game to play slowly. You are walking through an art gallery. Go ahead and climb up 20 flights of stairs with the full knowledge it will take you nowhere useful. Dive off the side of a ledge to fall through the world. Contemplate those black blobby things--why exactly do they seem evil?

There are so many games, TV shows, movies, and other content parading past us. Slow down and appreciate this beautiful thing someone made.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

ErikH2000
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

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In Carl Muckenhaupt style, I'll keep on adding to the "review"...

I finished the game yesterday. My play style is extremely unrushed, and even moreso for this game, which generously rewards poor gameplay with more opportunities to see beautiful things. I think I clocked about 12 hours on it.

I won't spoil the ending, but as I edged closer to it, I began to worry it would be anti-climactic. The trouble of having one awe-inspiring level after another is that it leaves no way to top what you've seen already. Even some of the rooms that are solely pathways from one challenge to the next dazzle. Intricate cathedrals, sprawling spaces, cuboid trees, 3D kaleidoscopes... it never lets up.

However, I was not disappointed by the ending, which felt in the same spirit as what came before, yet something different.

What I was not prepared for was the sadness that the game was done. After returning to the title screen, the menu offered the "Continue" menu option which gave me some hope. This returned me to the point just before winning the game. I hunted around for something extra I'd missed, but ended up with what I call the "end of summer camp" feeling. It's still the same place when you're saying goodbye to your friends and packing up to leave. And yet it's not a "summer camp" anymore without the purpose and activity.

Replay value? Hmm, not in the typical way for games. I'm looking forward to forgetting the game well enough to enjoy playing it through again from the beginning. And I'm pretty sure I will. It's a masterpiece.

A few more thoughts on the design...

People that love DROD puzzles may not necessarily love Manifold Garden. The DROD sensibility is to show all information needed for a solution at one time. DROD may require exploration of consequences that are seen through experimenting. But everything's pretty much right there in front of your face.

Much like Obduction and Cyan titles, Manifold Garden abounds with puzzles that would be trivial if displayed clearly and completely in one view. Much of the challenge comes from exploring the world in three non-Euclidian dimensions to construct a much simpler puzzle. Once you've modeled the puzzle correctly in your mind, its usually not hard to solve it.

So for example, there is a room with 3 sliding blocks, each with freedom to move in two directions. Getting them to the right configuration is not hard to work out. But the blocks are the size of skyscrapers, and it is a journey just to reach vantage points that allow you to know these three blocks exist and understand their possible movements to achieve a goal. If this traversal wasn't filled with beauty, the task would seem tedious to me.

The puzzles in the game could all have been made harder. But in my imagination, it was not lack of attention that kept them to moderate difficulty. After lots of experience creating puzzles, I know there are many times when it's more work to reduce difficulty of a puzzle and keep it remaining interesting. While I would have enjoyed DROD-style "challenges" or secret rooms to eke out more gameplay, I respect the accessible and generous feel of the game.

Also, maybe there are secret rooms and extra bits that I just wasn't clever enough to locate. I'll have to check on that.

Last thought... (I keep editing this to add more) There is no hint of story in the game. This has its strengths in presenting a unified experience. I am getting the notion that it is better to be all-in with story or all-out. There's a kind of uncanny valley when you put in a tiny bit of story and then leave the rest of the game devoid of it. The original Deadly Rooms of Death had this problem, and we alleviated it to some extent with KDD updates. The Witness is another game in the uncomfortable spot between Story and No-Story, though ultimately I enjoyed all its hints of something larger. In Manifold Garden, it was probably the right decision to exclude story from a game that already felt like it had heroically bitten off the very most it could chew for an indie studio.

Nobody made a game like this before. Someone please give William Chyr very large buckets of money for his next project.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)

dojo_b
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Thanks Erik, adding this to my Steam wishlist (October, they say!)

I personally think games like The Witness and Stephen's Sausage Roll, which sparingly and mysteriously suggest world and plot, are a kind of sweet spot for the genre (when done well, as I think these do).

The glaring feature of environmental puzzles is that their architecture will almost inevitably be weird, kooky and excessive from any perspective other than puzzles. No plot will ever fully explain the details, unless that plot itself involves puzzle-designers. Now with Portal that commitment is clear right away, but then the rest of the script is an exercise in comedy (successful IMO).

But if the goal is instead to inspire a certain wonderment, which fits thematically with puzzle-solving, then there ought to be a mystery: why were these puzzles put here? Or if that's asking too much, at least, why are certain strange aspects of this world the way they are?

Roughly speaking, the designer could answer the mystery in one of two ways: either by telling a long, complicated shaggy-dog story; or by having a relatively simple and striking answer, but approaching it sparingly and obliquely. I really wouldn't want to dismiss the first approach, which has led to many fine games (and arguably drives much successful genre fiction), but the second approach can bring literary quality and stirring emotion to an otherwise-abstract game.

ErikH2000
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Dojo, I liked your thoughts above on story and the needed tactics to add it. I guess I have a bias towards "all-in", and I'm very forgiving to designers that try and come a little short.

A few other devices that can carry it:

* Think of the game as a middle layer between the player and the true story world. The author does not try to explain the game-like bits of that layer. E.g. Why doesn't Beethro ever need to stop to eat or sleep in the game? If the player can simply imagine the game as a simplified view of a larger story, then it's possible to mention the concept of food (Roasted Roach Grill) or sleep (Beethro snoozing when you don't move him around).

* Integrate the game elements into a fantastic universe that allows for them. E.g. We want some rooms where Beethro doesn't have a sword, so we invent oremites.

Hmm, the second one is actually overlapping what you said about using a story that involves puzzle designers. Certainly, DROD did that too with the DAA.

I don't think it's necessary to explain the existence of puzzles though. I like the middle layer approach. No 4th-wall-breaking. No excessive invention. You can let a long journey along a riverside be filled with contrived puzzles and not need to explain that a bunch of beavers love discouraging travel by populating their territory with baffling puzzles.

Well-done background story in a puzzle game like Cyan's titles or The Witness... I'd rather have it than not. It definitely adds something cool. But it leaves me wanting more.

-Erik

____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals | twitch stream | youtube archive (NSFW)