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Games

Mind-Bending Architecture Photos from a World Inspired by Escher

William Chyr's 'Manifold Garden' is like being inside a physics-defying piece of art.
Images courtesy the artist

Braid. Monument Valley. Miegakure. All tiny indie games that took the existing rules and tweaked them just enough to create a compelling new experience too risky to be produced by a big design company. We're always on the lookout for creatives building the next crazy virtual worlds, and last year one of the best was William Chyr's Relativity, a 3D adventure puzzler on the scale of Portal, but with architecture and physics inspired by the mind-bending drawings of M.C. Escher. Solve giant mechanisms, navigate impossible geometry, and manipulate gravity itself in order to succeed.

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Last week, Chyr relaunched the project under the glitzier name, Manifold Garden, and rolled out a ton of new features, from water's behavior under different gravities, to a function that lets players photograph the world's twisted architecture. "The original prototype was based on the M.C. Escher print Relativity, and just involved changing gravity to walk on walls. The game is so much more than that now," Chyr tells The Creators Project.

As we've seen with the Grand Theft Auto V camera, crazy cool things can happen when players can capture their digital lives the same way they meticulously record their digital ones. Chyr has shared some of his own favorite snapshots exclusively with The Creators Project, but this is just a taste of the possibilities once the game is launched for PlayStation 4 (TBD).

Stay up to date about when you'll be able to explore these brain-busting worlds yourself on the official Manifold Garden website.

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