William Chyr isn’t your typical game developer, and his first game, Manifold Garden, doesn’t look quite like anything else we’ve ever played. After studying physics and economics as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, Chyr worked for several years as a sculptor and installation artist before taking an unexpected turn into game development.
Manifold Garden (formerly known as Relativity) — for which he cites the space-warping sequences of the film Inception as an inspiration — combines that academic background in physics with his experience designing immersive, artistic spaces. The result is a mind-bending, first-person puzzler that promises to challenge the player’s basic conceptions about space, gravity, and the shape of the universe.
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Set in seemingly infinite architectural structures that look ripped from the mind of M.C. Escher, Manifold Garden allows the player to alter the direction of gravity as they explore. An increasingly difficult series of puzzles and environments tasks the player with undoing all of their assumptions about exploring a space with a fixed up and down, and instead learning to truly think in three dimensions.
After several years of seeing the game on display at various industry shows, we finally got a chance to catch up with Chyr on the floor at E3 2016, so he could tell us a bit more about Manifold Garden. The game is currently in development for PlayStation 4 and PC with no release date yet announced.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.