

Good news, you can use the red apple as a ledge to balance the blue apple on. You're now standing on a blue floor and holding a blue apple. Let's say you have a red apple and it's stuck to a red floor. Anyway, the crucial thing you learn early on in Manifold Garden is that, even when an apple has been dropped and you can't move it, you can still use it. Sadly, everything I "know" about this stuff comes from reading the odd New Scientist magazine when someone has been obliging enough to leave it on a train, and that doesn't happen very often, so we'll park this thought here for now. I wonder, dimly, if this is a riff on that funny quantum business of how each particular field corresponds to a particular particle. Equally, if you're holding a red apple, say, and you move to a blue surface, you have to accept that you're going to drop the red apple where you stand and it will be fixed in place until you move back to the red surface again. If you have to get one into a sort of lock thing to open up a door, that lock had better be part of the same colour system and floor the apple came from. More importantly, you can only lift these apples up and move them around when you're standing on the surface that matches their colour. For one thing they're actually apples, each one given the colour of the tree that grew it - the tree that, you've got this, shares the colour of the surface you're standing on. Blue surface, blue switch, you're off to the races. Most importantly, each surface, each colour, has switches and blocks that will only behave when you're standing on that surface. Things fall to the floor around you, water streams in a different direction or simply stops. Each wall you walk on is given a different colouring to allow you to orient yourself, and after a few puzzles you learn that you're not just changing the surface you can walk on but also the gravity of the world.
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What you're learning here is how to climb on walls, which can be done fairly easily by approaching the surface you want and pressing a trigger. And so one of the greatest outdoors games of all time begins in poky little corridors and spare bedrooms. But the game takes a while to teach you the things you need to know in order to get oriented.

Always there is somewhere to go, somewhere to get to, a path that leads you forward, even if forward may look like upside-down, like inside-out, like backwards. Cathedrals rise up out of the peachy void, the Lloyd Wrights mint atria and quadrangles from rose-coloured dawn.

Manifold Garden is a game about working your way through fantastical geometry, bending all things except logic and cause and effect. They are surprisingly frequent, sure, but each one stands for something, a little bit more understanding, a little bit more progress, a fresh way of viewing the world that had been obscured until now.įor the first hour, though, I was not convinced.

But Manifold's Garden's epiphanies are not cheap at all. Game epiphanies can seem cheap sometimes: the music does this, the god rays do that and then you feel like the world has turned its face towards you and smiled a sleepy smile. When a solution to a problem in Manifold Garden finally becomes clear and turns out to be both audacious and simple, I often find myself laughing out loud. Actually it is an astonishing amount of fun.
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