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Exploring the Impossible Architecture of Manifold Garden

09.23.19 | By
Exploring the Impossible Architecture of Manifold Garden

Taking a detour from our usual architecture coverage, let’s veer into the imaginary realms of William Chyr Studio. Their new title Manifold Garden was recently announced as one of the many titles coming to Apple Arcade – an architectural puzzler set in an impossible dreamscape with structures and movement unfettered by physics.

Presented in a sort of stylized Revit model gone mad, the yet-to-be-released title isn’t your typical explorative 3D puzzler. While the setting is obviously “Escheresque” (and in fact, the game creator William Chyris cites M.C. Escher’s Relativity as direct inspiration), architecture folding unto itself evokes cinematic memories of Christopher Nolan’s “Inception”.

The imaginary landscape ruled by non-Euclidean physics is populated by series of penrose staircases connecting layers of labyrinthine levels; gravity is subtracted within these realms, inviting gamers to explore and solve puzzles from a 1st-person perspective.

The otherworldly architecture of Manifold Garden is slated to be released exclusively on the Epic Games Store for PC and Apple Arcade/iOS, and also Playstation 4. Until then, check out the developer’s Tumblr for a cool selection of themed wallpaper, or other inventive design-oriented puzzlers like Monument Valley and Inks to tide you over.

Gregory Han is a Senior Editor at Design Milk. A Los Angeles native with a profound love and curiosity for design, hiking, tide pools, and road trips, a selection of his adventures and musings can be found at gregoryhan.com.