The Gardens Between

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

The Gardens Between is a Puzzle game with a focus on manipulating events in time. You play as a pair of young friends, but you mostly don’t control them directly. Instead, you control the flow of time as they explore abstract islands representing the memories they share together.

As you move time forward, the two children will move forward, and when you reverse it, they’ll move back. However, some elements in the environment can be changed, and some won’t be altered the same way by your manipulation of time, the the game’s puzzles tend to come in the form of understanding how to use those differences to get the children past the obstacles in their way.

The puzzle design in this game really is top-notch. The game’s puzzles are conveyed to the player wordlessly and without much instruction, meaning that solving them is just down to observation and deduction. And some of these puzzles are really clever too. I was tempted to mention a few, but I’d rather not spoil it – suffice it to say, the puzzles in this game are really fantastic.

What is decidedly not fantastic is how slow it is to walk the children back and forth, especially if you’re doing it multiple times while trying to figure out a puzzle. The kids are frustratingly slow, and there’s no “fast forward” or “rewind” command when manipulating time.

Then there’s the game’s other main issue, its length. This is a game that can be completed in 1-2 hours. And while the game seems to take itself very seriously, as if its visual story was the real point here, in the end, the story it tells isn’t especially deep or moving. I would been perfectly happy to do without the story elements of this game if I could have had twice as many great puzzles.

It’s a pity the story here doesn’t do much for me too, because the game’s audiovisual presentation is fantastic, with some really nice detail in the environments that makes good use of the time-shifting mechanic when stuff is being moved around or breaking apart. The game’s soundtrack, also, is really nice… although again, it seems to think that the game’s topic matter is more profound than it actually is.

In the end, The Gardens Between is a beautiful puzzle game with some superb puzzle design. It’s a bit too focused on its underwhelming story, and the already-short game feels even shorter as a result, but what’s here is very good, and worth playing.

tl;dr – The Gardens Between is a Puzzle game that has you manipulating time as two children walk through islands that represent their memories together. The game’s presentation is wonderful, and its puzzle design is excellent, although the game is far too short, and overly interested in its less-than-stellar story.

Grade: B+

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