The Gardens Between Review

Introduction

The Gardens Between is a puzzle game developed and published by indie studio The Voxel Agents. It was released for PC and Consoles in September of 2019.

Review

When you’re with friends, any adventure feels magical. When you’re sitting on a couch, playing video games with a friend, you can see it as a grand adventure! Or if you’re doing something like building a treehouse, it can be perceived as a battle, where you scale mountains and battle with giant slabs of lumber! You can never know the true fun, unless you live it.

The game is told a lot through visual storytelling. So there is no dialogue, it’s all a matter of how you perceive it. To me, it was a story about how two friends were reminiscing over old memories. At first I had no idea what the game was trying to tell, until the end of the third level. Then the ending really made it hit home for me, and it got me pretty sad honestly.

The game is a very simple experience. It’s played as a puzzle game with time manipulation mechanics. All you do is forward or rewind time, while you interact with a few objects that are in your path. This opened up some interesting puzzles. Like watching the path some objects go down, then putting my lamp on it, to avoid some obstacles. Or how can I get the lit lamp past the path of darkness, that steals my light. It was fantastic to figure out.

But some I felt like I was a bit lucky with. Like one where there were lightning strikes, and I had to position things and then manipulate time, to cause the lightning to lash out at another object. Maybe it was because at one point I was incredibly tired, because the music was so soothing, and was making me very relaxed, to the point I was falling asleep.

But it didn’t help a bit of my tiredness when I was figuring out the puzzles, and I could only manipulate time at a predetermined speed. Sure the levels were very small, so the characters didn’t take too long for them to rewind or fast forward to specific locations, it would’ve been nice to have speed options. But once I got everything proper, it was nice seeing the character move their way through the scene to the end. I do half wish the game was longer though. As it only ran me a couple of hours.

Rating

Pros:

Great Coming To Age Story
Amazing Music
Interesting Gameplay Concept

Cons:

Some Puzzles Felt A Bit Luck Based
Couldn’t Adjust Speed Of Time Manipulation

Summary

This game was better than I expected. From the story it conveyed, to the music it had, to the scenes that play out in each level! I do wish I could’ve made time go fast though when I had to constantly rewind or fast forward to figure out puzzles, but the levels were mostly small enough that it didn’t make it too unbearable. The other nice thing is that the game can be nicely beaten in one sitting!

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Game & Developer Information

Developer/Publisher Website: The Voxel Agents
Developer/Publisher Socials: Twitter
PSN Store Links: £15.99/€19.99 Europe / $19.99 North America
Trophy Information: 18. 1 / 8 / 9 / 0