Your Score 0 Summary: The 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. After years of growth together, Frendt is moving away, and The Gardens Between is about their intertwined past. It is clear that Arina is headstrong and Frendt is a cautious thinker.
Price: $4.99
Version: 1.0
App Reviewed on: iPhone XR
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When you play The Gardens Between, time stops. I mean this both in the sense that playing this puzzle adventure is an arresting experience, and that its core mechanics revolve around time manipulation. Simply put, The Gardens Between is a game absolutely worth your time.
Island time
The Gardens Between is a difficult game to describe. It opens with a scene in a treehouse between two houses. Inside are a boy and a girl taking shelter from the rain. Then, lightning flashes, a mysterious orb of light appears, and—upon touching it—the boy and girl are suddenly transported to an island.
This is no typical island either. It's littered with household items and has a stone altar at the top. For some reason, the characters decide they must activate said altar using a special lantern. If that weren't strange enough, time behaves strangely on this island. Your characters are frozen in time until you move them. When you move them forward, time moves forward, but when you move them backward, time reverses. Yes, I know. It's all very confusing. But in playing The Gardens Between, it feels pretty natural and intuitive. It almost feels like someone took some sections of Jonathan Blow's Braid and built them out into its own, fully fledged experience.
Objectively good
Each level in The Gardens Between is a separate island, and islands are grouped together by a sort of 'scene' they create when combined. For example, there's a cluster of islands with garden hoses, beach towels, coolers, and inflatable pools making up a lot of the terrain. When you complete these islands, you are treated to a snapshot of a backyard pool scene between the main characters.
Using these scenes, The Gardens Between weaves together a light narrative that operates through visual metaphor. To be honest, the storytelling in the game I found a little vexing until the very end, but it hardly mattered. What I found more impressive was how the new objects in each island would always present new and unique puzzle challenges, to the point that I wanted to see every new and clever thing The Gardens Between could do with its time manipulation mechanics.
Nostalgia trip
I couldn't put The Gardens Between down because it never stopped showing me new, beautiful, and incredible things. Every puzzle is newer and more exciting than the last, each island is more detailed and visually exciting than the one before, and the story—as sparse as it is—ultimately hits a really strong emotional chord at the end that is pleasantly surprising.
I also can't speak highly enough of the work put into bringing The Gardens Between to smaller screens. Its gorgeous visuals and ethereal soundtrack are probably best to experience on an iPad, but the game looks and plays amazingly well on a phone, too (and in portrait mode, no less). If you have both a tablet and phone, you also don't necessarily have to choose how you want to play The Gardens Between, as it syncs your progress flawlessly between both as you make your way through it.
The bottom line
So much of what makes The Gardens Between so great needs to be experienced. Trying to explain it more simply won't help you get it. Instead, you should just go play The Gardens Between without giving it a second thought.
In all likelihood it's unlikely you'll find another PS4 title quite like The Gardens Between this year. A puzzler that deals with bittersweet themes of wistful memories and moving away, The Gardens Between might not be the most challenging, nor the longest puzzler around, but it does possess an infectiously earnest quality that ensures it stays with you long after you've beaten it.
A thoughtful and abstract meditation on the relationship of best friends Frendt and Arina, The Gardens Between has players venturing through a number of ethereal, diorama style garden islands that are strewn with items and objects from their childhood.
The Gardens Between Is A Charmingly Inventive Though All Too Brief Puzzler
Viewed from a side-on perspective that follows the pair as they wind their way up and around each island, the basic gist of the The Gardens Between is that you progress from one island to another, uncovering memories and understanding the bonds of friendship that have kept Arina and Frendt such close friends for so long. Fluid browser 1 6 installer. How you actually progress however, is by reaching the zenith of each island and solving the puzzles along the way that get you there.
Where things get especially interesting is in how The Gardens Between deals with player agency. Rather than a set of basic controls that are divided out into the usual walk/run, jump, duck and other such actions, The Gardens Between is essentially controlled by one button and an analogue stick – with the former used to interact with objects in the environment, and the latter being used to push time forward or rewind it. Basically, time only moves forwards or backwards when you tell it to.
As you might well imagine, The Gardens Between takes advantage of its unique premise to create some fairly unusual puzzles. Because Frendt and Arina move at different speeds and approach the island in different ways from one another, when time pushes forward or rolls backwards, they will always find themselves on different points on the island and it's here that the majority of The Gardens Between's numerous conundrums play out.
For example, one situation might require Arina to open a light bridge with a lamp that has captured an orb of light. The problem is, when she approaches the bridge the light from her lamp is stolen by a ball of darkness that has bloomed from a nearby flower. The solution? Simply rewind time and have Frendt pull a switch that closes the flower, thus ensuring that the light in Arina's lamp is never snuffed out and allowing the duo to proceed onward.
Though such puzzles might seem conceptually trite, The Gardens Between isn't afraid to get pleasingly inventive with them, even if the challenge never quite reaches the heady levels that more seasoned puzzle fans might expect. In particular, a lot of the later levels focus on using the time flow function to freeze events in place and use physics to achieve your goal; requiring the player to think a little more outside the box than they perhaps normally would.
The Gardens Between Review Reddit
At just over a couple of hours long, The Gardens Between is not an especially substantive affair that much is for a sure, and its a fact that when coupled with its less than robustly challenging, though highly inventive conundrums ensures that the whole thing is simply all over far too quickly than we'd like.
Nonetheless, with its deeply touching narrative, relatable themes and vividly realized visual style, The Gardens Between nonetheless remains a compelling puzzling curio that everyone should spare a few hours of their time to invest themselves into.
The Gardens Between Review And Advise
The Gardens Between from The Voxel Agents releases for PS4, PC and Nintendo Switch on September 20, 2018.
Review code supplied by the publisher.
