Manifold Garden

Manifold Garden is a first-person puzzle game built around a simple but disorienting premise: gravity points in whichever direction you choose, and the world repeats infinitely in every direction. Walk off a ledge and you don't fall to your death — you loop, eventually returning to where you started. Reorient your perspective ninety degrees and what was a wall is now floor; the architecture of the level didn't change, but you did.

The puzzles use that mechanic to explore impossible architecture in a literal sense. Most rooms are unsolvable from any single perspective and become solvable once you walk on a different surface, and the environments — clean, geometric, openly indebted to Escher's prints — are designed so that almost no two walls share an orientation. Cultivating gardens to open new pathways works as the game's main progression layer, with vegetation slowly returning to a barren world as you solve your way through it.

Developer William Chyr spent years building the game more or less single-handed, and the result has the consistency of a single designer's vision throughout. It picked up nominations for Best Debut from the Game Developers Choice Awards and BAFTA Game Awards and landed on the New Yorker's list of the best games of 2019. A Photo Mode is layered on top because the architecture is genuinely worth photographing, which the game's audience figured out almost immediately.