The Gardens Between is a masterpiece of minimalist storytelling, weaving a wordless tale of friendship and time. By drawing upon a few, nearly-universal childhood events, it allows the player to fill in the story with their own emotions and memories, creating a shockingly moving, personal experience. Featuring a gorgeous, surrealist style and challenging but fair puzzles, this is a must-have title for anyone who enjoys puzzle games.
Wow this game was excellent. I loved the characters and the way they interacted with the levels considering how little direct control you have over their movements. The puzzles were clever, consistency changing, and occasionally even mind bending where I had to reimagine the rules the level in order to solve them. The story was a nice ode to fleeting childhood friendships and the infinite imagination you have while playing with your friends at that age. The levels themselves showed the player the the silent, melancholy story taking place after each set of levels through the use of larger than life set pieces like giant slides and video game consoles. Can't say I'll play a game just like this ever again.
The Gardens Between is a great example of a puzzle game with the most simple of mechanics, showcasing how much can be stretched out of so little. Its light story of friendship is sweet (if not a bit too saccharine). It complements the core mechanic of controlling the passage of time, and well, the inevitability of how no matter how much you'd like time to stand still sometimes, it'll move along regardless.
I was impressed with the concept. I just craved more of it and was left with a melancholy feeling myself once the memories ceased. [Issue #37 – January/February 2019, p. 19]
There are fleeting moments of brilliance to the puzzle design in The Gardens Between, but, between them, the pace meanders to the point where my interest started to wane. There can be no doubt that it’s unlike anything else that you will have played before, but, in turn, the wondrous idea that lies at its core never feels like it blossoms into something that manages to enter its stride. The potential and talent is clear, though, and I greatly look forward to seeing what The Voxel Agents create next.
The Garden is a very beautiful and moving game that lacks some fresh ideas after a few minutes of the game. Its mechanics are cool but it's too bad it lacks challenge and never tries to renew its formula during the entire adventure...which is only 3 hours long.
This game is beautiful...sound design is amazing; characters are pretty cool. It's cohesive, interesting, wraps up well and makes you feel something. You're best off playing with this game with headphones/earbuds in or with nice speaker.s.. the sound is really that good. The puzzle difficulties range from easy to pretty hard. It's a pretty brief game and you likely won't want to play it again until enough time has passed that you forget how to solve the puzzles. But i wish I could forget and play it again! Look forward to more games by the Voxel Agents
This game is…okay. It’s a short, linear puzzle game that doesn’t have much of a story and is probably most akin to Captain Toad Treasure Tracker in gameplay. But rather than moving freely you move you characters backward and forward through time, while manipulating their available pathways and objects through time as well. Doing this to get to the end of each stage. It’s got some neat little puzzles and I didn’t mind it being short, but something felt missing. I think it needed a interesting story to dress up the puzzles to keep you wanting to see what was next. A real reward for completing each puzzle. Without the more interesting story, it just felt like it was a string of stand alone puzzles that shouldn’t have bothered with a theme or story at all.
The Gardens Between
A short charming puzzle
The Gardens Between is a puzzle game where you play as 2 friends spending their final day together…
And you control both of them…
However not separately…
The gardens Between takes place across 19 levels and is a little less than 2 and a half hours long…
Here you’ll be doing increasingly challenging puzzles involving a lamp…
The controls and Idea is simple... you can move forwards or backwards which will rewind time or progress time… and both characters move simultaneously... so there is no back and forth nonsense going on here exactly…
there is a bit.. but it’s more of lining things up, passing the light onto the little box helpers in levels, or figuring out codes or ways to line up the environment to get past…
All with the end goal of getting the light to the end…
getting over the different environmental obstacles in your way trying to stop this from happening
nothing ever too difficult which I appreciate…
it’s a quick little charming brain teaser…
and I felt the gameplay consistently changing things up slightly as the game goes on while keeping the goal the same…
but slowly new obstacles will be thrown at you which will carry onto the problem solving of levels throughout..
There are so many unique and memorable puzzles here…
this is definitely a game puzzle game fans should give a shot…
There’s not much of a story and things won’t necessarily challenge you…..
But there is something special and enjoyable here in the Gardens between
I give the gardens between
a 7.5/10
Just one of those cheap, generic looking "indie" games that makes you guess what the developers have programmed into their OWN game and calls it "puzzles". Not even worth the dollar it is during eShop sales
SummaryThe Gardens Between is a surreal puzzle adventure that follows best friends, Arina and Frendt, as they fall into a mysterious world of beautiful garden islands. Manipulate time to solve puzzles and discover the secrets of each island.