Dr. Strange isn’t the only one to travel through and open the multiverse this year. A young kid, who doesn’t know how to introduce himself, unlocks the multiverse and glitches into another universe one day while researching the multiverse theory on his computer. Erwin his pet cat, like most cats couldn’t care less, and I bet is thanking the cat gods to finally have some peace.

While stumbling around the multiverse and glitching between them, the kid gets caught by Everett, a master of traversing universes. Everett saves the kid and is about to return him home, however the kid begs to accompany Everett on his travels and help with whatever it is that Everett is doing. Now recruited as Everett’s assistant, the kid does all the hard work of unlocking the path ahead while Everett sits back, gambles, and sinks a few brews. What the kid doesn’t realize is that he has stepped foot into something much bigger than he could have imagined.

What Lies in the Multiverse is a story-driven puzzle platformer that revolves around the multiverse. Developed by Studio Voyager and IguanaBee, and published by Untold Tales, this indie platformer is available on, PC, Switch, Xbox and Playstation.

The game features a vast selection of universes to explore, however, we are limited in how many universes we can traverse per stage to only 2. The areas you swap between across the multiverse are complete opposites from one another, one moment you are in a desert construction zone, next you’re in the same construction zone but everything has been frozen to its core. These alternate universes hold some dark secrets. Filled with death and despair, I wasn’t expecting such horrors in a cute little pixelated puzzle platformer.

Switch back to the happy and safe dimension and these dark stories really came to life. The same characters from the safe dimension were now just a pile of bones, with some diary entries left behind to let you know what had occurred. I enjoyed swapping between the universes at any point I could to piece together these events; one man was out fishing waiting for a bite, swap universe and all I could see was a risen water level and a floating corpse. Swap back again, head into town, and a villager had said how there a no fish in that cave and that he was wasting his time waiting for a bite. These dark alternative stories had me hooked, I needed to know what was happening and how these dark events occurred. Everything was linked.

What lies in the Multiverse features multiple beautiful pixel art worlds meshed together through a simple mechanic where you can switch universes, and doing so is an essential part of solving the puzzles throughout the world to progress. Switching worlds is seamless and the use of it during puzzles was genius, however after a while puzzles started to feel tedious and somehow repetitive. Move some boxes around and do some jumps while swapping universes, rinse and repeat.

In games audio was amazing. The backing tracks in the levels had me easily immersed and lost within these pixelated worlds for what felt like a couple of minutes where, in actual fact, it was easily 10x that. Each area has different audio, with your original universe’s music style being extremely chill and mellowed, whereas the alternate dark universe has audio to mimic its setting. All of these tracks were extremely immersive and perfectly reflected the scenes you were traveling through, however in some areas where having to swap universes in quick succession was essential, the audio switch over was quite jarring. Swapping between two different tracks over and over in some puzzles felt like that one friend who listens to a few seconds of a song then skips.

The menus have quite a familiar audio effect as well, and as soon as I heard it, I couldn’t un-hear it. The memories of calling suss on everyone as the imposter came flooding back. The menu selection audio is a direct copy-paste from Among Us, which killed the vibe of the game when scrolling through as it just wasn’t original. I was hoping that they would have their own great audio for this but unfortunately not. Going from some amazingly atmospheric audio tracks to effect audio from another game just didn’t feel right.

All in all the game was very fun to play and the soundtrack had me zoning out in an instant, but the menu audio was a downside and broke the originality of the game. I would have liked to have been able to traverse more than 1 alternate universe per stage but only having 2 universes to select kept the fluidity of the game clean. Although the puzzles did have challenging aspects, they felt much the same after a while. To anyone wanting to play a new platformer or something fresh with a hilarious main story and dark side stories, I recommend picking this game up!

Written by: Bigfoot