The Gardens Between Review – An instant indie masterpiece

The Gardens Between is a charming, endearing, and perfectly crafted indie experience. Created by a small Melbourne-based developer, the game tells a personal story as you explore the memories and imagination of two young friends. The game is imaginative, novel, engaging, clever, and downright gorgeous. It contains a level of quality to its visual style and subtle storytelling that would make even the most cantankerous gamer instantly fall in love.

The Gardens Between takes place on a variety of small island structures. Each island is made up of natural formations intertwined with objects and props from the memories of our two protagonists. The boys explore these environments and therefore explore their past, as each object around them is pulled directly from the memories they have formed and the moments they have shared together. The world they explore is quite surrealist in nature and quite frankly gorgeous to look at, but each environment also brings its own set of challenges for the player to overcome.

The Gardens Between is a puzzle game at its core, but the way the game creates those puzzles is like nothing I have seen before. The two boys explore each island, not via traditional control methods, but via the rewinding or fast forwarding of time. At certain moments within that timeline the boys can interact with objects such as lanterns or switches that remain active even once time is rewound. It’s via these exceptions to the standard time formula that allows the world to shift, paths to open, and the boys to progress. With the game boiling down to three types of input (fast forward, rewind, and interact), I thought there would be serious limitations to the depth of puzzle solving. But the creativity and ingenuity of the game’s design meant that I was constantly surprised and delightfully perplexed by the puzzle laid out before me. I was wrong to have my doubts.

The puzzle design of the game is super engaging with enough new interactions being introduced that I never got bored or felt like the game was overstaying its welcome. The time mechanic is novel and really engrossing not only due to how it exists as the basis of the game’s puzzles, but also how it exists as the basis of the game’s narrative. There’s an interconnectivity between the game’s mechanics and its narrative, with time being the core motif.

It’s hard not to sing the praises of The Gardens Between without pointing to the game’s stunning visuals. The game’s style is quite simple and pared-back but absolutely gorgeous. There’s a vibrancy and charm to the visuals that matches the theme and atmosphere of the game perfectly. The animations of the characters and the world is very smooth, as is the way the camera rotates around each island as time moves. Time can be stopped at any given moment, meaning any single frame within the game can be lingered on. Yet no matter how hard you try, you won’t find a single frame of this game that doesn’t look like a piece of art.