Recent reviews by mystery_man

Child cries at poop, dies, resurrects as a flying corpse, kills the bible and throws it at their mother, then wears her dress and births a demon before sticking a pencil in their eye to bleed at a messenger of god for giving them free ♥♥♥♥. If you wanna play a game where the above is considered regular, this is it ^^ Fine story, fitting graphics and, like, hundreds of hours of amazing and varied gameplay. Like, at the time of writing this i got 547h played and I still haven´t played with nearly half the characters or unlocked half the unlockables and I´m having a blast still. Oh btw there´s multiplayer now, like you can have 3 friends join you on your adventure! If you have good internet you can even play together remotely thanks to daddy steam. What r u waiting for, time to fling open the hatch and throw yourself into the unknown depths below!

Get it. Keep in mind it´s quite a bit sad and might touch upon a trauma you might have, so maybe avoid it if that´s the case? Sensitive topics included, which I can think of off the top of my head would be mental health, death of all stripes and abuse. Also don´t get it if you aren´t looking for digging into those topics somewhat, as there´s no gameplay to speak of which doesn´t have exploration of them as a pay-off and why would u playsomething the payoff of which you won´t enjoy. Also maybe don´t get it if you just wanna complain about having emotions invoked in you because normal people don´t have those and therefore you wanna go went in the community tab about everyone who likes the game being an emo and needing help. For anyone still here, cheers and have a good one ^^

its good, u wont be disappointed. Gets progressively more interesting ^^

This game is everything superliminal is not.
That sentence comes from having played the games rather close together and having thereby a pretty good comparison from the genre. My praise will therefore reflect my grievances with the other game, consider it a 2 in 1 review.
Exhibit A: Manifold garden is beautifully consistent: any rule you learn once stays that way for the remainder of the game, never flinching even if a puzzle would be easier to do without it or even if it´s presence may confuse you about how to actually go about solving a puzzle.
Now that might sound either duh or mildly inconvenient if you have little experience with physics bending puzzle games, but believe me, it´s crucial. It´s what makes portal so enjoyable, aside from the characters. Every single puzzle you feel like you had all the tools and all it took was a bit of ingenuity to put them together correctly. Furthermore, you might be asking why that is praiseworthy, aren´t game mechanics supposed to be consistent? Well, it is praiseworthy because of how far the game goes outside of normal physics. Portal manages to stay consistent with, well, the titular portal. Other physics puzzle games manage it with the tried and true cube, beam and occasional light platforming. Manifold Garden manages consistency with 1. changing the direction of gravity 2. infinitude in basically every direction at almost all times 3.flowing water and 4. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ timestop mechanics (I´ll elaborate later) on top of the standard boxes! Not to mention ...
Exhibit B: It never feels gimmicky! I cannot stress enough how natural the rules of this peculiar little (actually infinite) world feel. You have multiple opportunities to encounter mechanics before they become crucial for a puzzle, like encountering the flowing water and thinking at first it might just be decorative, but uuh boy it sure isn´t! Whenever expected to learn a new mechanic you are put into a situation where trying it out is designed to feel just plausible enough to not feel like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ but presentet ambivalently enough to not feel like the game is trying to hold your hand. Later on, old mechanics (with arguably exactly one exception) do not get forgotten but are expanded or made to interact with the new ones in increasingly creative, fun and frankly mind-blowing ways. The consistent feeling adds to the world´s authentic ...
Exhibit C: Atmosphere. From the graphical presentation strongly reminiscent of Antechamber to the subtle yet fitting and all the more impactful when intensified musical score, this world is pure Art. You feel like contributing to the creation or at least cleanup of a hyperdimensional art installation, or the titular garden. You are rewarded for completing each "gauntlet" of puzzles by jaw-dropping sights so beautiful you will sometimes actively stay in a "solved" room and infinityfall through it some to look at what your work has amounted to. Not many games of this genre manage to make rewards for puzzles more than the inherent satisfaction and the ability to continue, this one does. This feature is also strongly supported by ...
Exhibit D: The freedom. This game, except in obvious cases where your further manipulation with the world prevents it, basically lets you backtrack or get anywhere within it you were or can see (except for glassed machines but hey, them´s the breaks). You do not have a path charted out, you do not have to go on, you can and will loop back again and again to some places, changing some each time you visit and you start looking forward to visiting again! At one point the game had me searching feverishly for a sollution to a puzzle, backtracking to somewhere I was 2 hours before in seconds, before realising that 1. there was no way i could solve my present problem with any material in the previous room and 2. the fact I even thought this might be the sollution to a puzzle shows just how interconnected and, just, whole this world with quite alien geography and geometry to our own feels. EDIT: While writing I wanted to backtrack to a specific point way back and found out i couldn´t for no obvious in-universe reaseon, guess there had to be some issue, eh? After all the designers are still only human...

The last bit is somewhat spoilery, therefore only read on if you want to hear about something that might quite possibly makes the dicussed elements feel way less authenticbecause you heard my vague description of it. You have been warned!

Exhibit E: The story. There is none... Ok while that´s technically true as not a single line of dialogue is spoken in the game, it still manages to feel important. The interplay of color, shape and sound at important milestones slowly gives you the feeling of, well, a gardener of something way bigger than you and not quite understood by you. This black shapelessness is increasingly present e v e r y w h e r e and objoects causing irregularities/glitching out of nearby geometry litter the world like weeds in an untended garden. All your successes lead you to a final installation filled with the black pollution and solving these rooms removes the irregularities source, removes all the black obstruction and creates a wonderful hyperdimenional vortexlike "thing" in the air, leading you back to what could be called the central hub. These are presented to you, first, from a fixed perspective and afterwards are set into the world for you to go fall through if you wanna take a closer look (I allways did). These do however lead to a climax. After solving all 6 directions you get to the final gauntlet and get first, a rainbow hypershape and second, a last level. This one is the hyperspoiler so jump ship if you haven´t played the game yet. If I didn´t convince you to play it by this point, just go read a different review, dude, alright?
Ok so in the last "level" you are treated to further jawdropping sights before being yourself dropped into, this time, a true infinitude. Not an infinitude of recurrance, like up to this point, but into an infinitude of variance. You are treated to an incredible journey through quite possibly some fractal pattern (not sure, didn´t study enough irl geometry to know) which is just mesmerising. I never have done DMT, but I imagine this might be similar to it (unless you encounter something which communicates verbally on the other side, I guess, since there still isn´t dialgue here). I can´t quite capture the beauty and sense of scale and importance this spectacle which could reductionistically be called a "bunch of flashing colors" invoked for me. I wanted to try but I suppose it must be experienced, eh?
I caught myself thinking "what if this was what awaited in the middle of the no mans sky galaxy?" and while it would have been neat there it just would not fit as well as here. No mans sky is, in it´s essence, about emptyness despite infinite variety, Manifold Garden is about fullness and comprehensiveness using a "limited" toolbelt. The pure form-color-sound synthesis at the end is a culmination of a genuinly one of a kind world, which feels, without any skill tree or action elements, more akin to the endpoint of a progression than most games with fully realised skill trees manage after you have mastered the game. It feels like a reward well earned. It wants you to go write a stupidly long review singing it´s praises. It want´s you to not be horny anymore, just happy.

If you made it to the end, I both sallute you and am sorry for making such a wall of text. The game has left a genuine impression on me and I had to vent somewhere. If this review motivates a single person to get the game or finds some resonance in another player looking for other´s experiences, it will have achieved more than enough to justify it´s existence.

I got the game in the winter sale, which is half the reason I´m not refunding it.
There are puzzle games which introduce an element and have you find ever more creative ways to use it, like portal.
There are the standard puzzle games which introduce one element after the other, stacking the difficulty that way.
Then there is this. Don´t get me wrong, when it works it works and there is about an hour of very workable content here, the perspective change genuinly is fun in multiple places.
But when it doesnt work it´s horrendous. I mainly mean a part towards the end where you are literally meant to be running at walls to see if they are passable or not, but throughout the whole game there has been this sense of, well, things making very little sense. "It´s supposed to be like that, it´s a dream!" i hear you say. But to that I counter, that although dreams have dream logic they still have some cause and effect linkage. Here many times it feels entirely arbitrary what is and what is not possible and the game, unlike a good puzzle game which has a learning curve, has more of a learning flat plane with a few speedbumps and, if you´re unlucky, a wall somewhere along.
Also, I personally suffer from motionsickness and this game gave it to me without moving at all. Some very old bionicles games used to do the same, might be sth about the graphics coupled with an overarching sense of frustration.

Now, there are some redeeming qualities to this game.
1. It is innovative, in a somewhat stale genre. The last innovative game since portal was imo antechamber, and while that one was waaaay more successful at doing what it set out to do, this still counts as a plus.
2. There are genuinly visually stunning parts to this game and way more environment variability than in your standard puzzle game.
3. The Dr. on the Radio was pretty fun and thought provoking in the end. Honestly, he could´ve just used a smoother experience to be tied to.
MILD SPOILER His ending speech did connect on the level of doing sth purposefully the wrong way to get the failure we expect and maybe that might be why at some points i just had to pull up a guide. Maybe I was stuck in a selfsabotaging mental loop. Or maybe it was just bad game design with salient philosophising after the fact to make it seem more profound. who knows. END OF MILD SPOILER

Overall I would not recommend the experience to most. Maybe if you are a weirdo or the game´s concept intrigues you enough that you are willing to forgive it´s flaws, then get it on sale. 4/10

Get the game if: you like greek mythology; you find the concept of renovating the palace of the underworld appealing; you want to befriend gods, ghosts, monsters and two lively skeletons; you´d like to right some mythological wrongs; you´d like to fight your way out of the underworld using a rocket launcher; you want a thrilling roguelike experience; you want to feel like progressing every time you fail, making failure feel fresh and interesting not a horrible setback
Don´t get it if: you´re worried about loosing track of time, you don´t want to share any booze you find, you´re not into a bdsm relationship with a monowinged lady, you dislike bright colors, you cannot stomach the idea of just being out of luck

Overall, the game is an amazing achievement: a storydriven roguelike. The story progresses the most whenever you die out there, making failure not sting quite as much, at the same time after you have once won you can stack modifiers as long as you want to make the game infinitely harder, for those hardcore roguelike players. You can technically skip through all dialogue if you´re not interested in the story, I´d consider that a waste tho.
Also, that soundtrack 0u0

The tightest controls in a platformer but also the hardest platformer without being unfair/10

Overall a quality platformer, the jokes even get funny after a while! But there is one issue, towards the end it gets frustrating and unfair beyond any reasonable measure. You start needing to look up walkthroughs and stuff, because the game starts forcing you to use mechanics which were nowhere before, or without which it was possible to play through all the previous levels. Now I'm all for continuous learning curve, but the final timed boss area really should be testing everything you learned before, not teach you new stuff. But overall a great game and can recommend.

The DLC is everything it says on the cover: tons of new items, pickups, trinkets, enemies, bosses, a new, REALLY fun gamemode and a new end-game boss (which is the hardest boss in the entire game). It also comes with two new endings which, frankly, I have no idea how to fit into any of my favourite story theories, but they're still really interesting. As for the new character, she is a work of art. Super cool character design, red hair and it is probably my favourite character. I did notice some strange buffs to enemies and nerfs to the player chracter which do seem kinda unfair, but Ed said they didn't mean to nerf us so hard, so looking forward to future patches. All in all, highly recommend for anyone who liked the original.