MANIFOLD GARDEN

Forget weeds, this backyard is all zen

Few games can boast visuals as good as this. It’s not down to the graphics, though they certainly are crisp, but the design. This puzzler leads you through MC-Escher-inspired worlds of non-Euclidean geometry and looks beautiful while it does it. (Unsurprisingly its creator, William Chyr, has a background as an artist and sculptor.) It’s so good-looking that we’d easily pay the same cost as the game for a single art print of one of its intricate vistas.

Of course, in Manifold Garden, you don’t just look at static pictures. Playing in first-person, these puzzle rooms are fully three-dimensional for you to explore and view from pretty much any angle. Right from the start you’re able to hit i to manipulate gravity while next to a surface to snap yourself to that plane, allowing yourself to then fall great heights, Gravity Rush-style, or simply walk up walls. That said, because of how everything is designed, there aren’t usually obvious indicators that any of the gravity directions is properly ‘up’, and the environment is generally designed to allow you to easily manipulate yourself to pretty much any plane of gravity at any time. To ease confusion, each plane is tied to a colour that tints the world.