The Gardens Between

Imagine a game in which you can't actually control the characters you are playing - you can only move forwards and backwards in time to find out what they do and where they go.  Along the way, you may have the characters touch certain objects in order to subtly change the flow of time and enable them to progress along their pre-determined path.

This is the surreal and almost maddeningly passive world of The Gardens Between.

The feature that initially caught my attention as I was browsing the App Store was, as it often is for me, the beautiful and interesting graphics of the world within the game.  Each level is constructed of oversized objects of a child's play space, and encapsulates the imaginary world that the two children - a boy and a girl - spent together.  As they travel together in a treehouse in horizonless ocean, they move from island to island built with scenes such as a huge couch hidden by a blanket fort, giant dinosaur skeletons that break apart and tumble into the sea, and sewers draining into a whirlpool with log size soda cans swirling into it.  Each island progresses from gentle dawn, to rosy mid-day, to a terrifyingly dark storm world at the end as the worlds of child play begin to fall apart.  All this is portrayed without words or instructions, with a story that only opens up more questions until the very end.

Aesthetically, the game is unquestionably both visually stunning and unusual.  Although an incredible amount of detail is included in each of the scenes, with waving grass, paint splashes, etc., everything is somewhat pixelated with foggy edges, contributing to the dream-like atmosphere.  The children pause when the flow of time stops, their figures blurring in the frozen motion, but the island's breezes continue to blow and the streams of water continue to flow.  Flowers give off orbs of light that the little girl can collect in her lantern in order to progress through the level and finally solve it.  The little boy is able to touch chimes that can shift events or move a certain part of time backwards and forwards.  As each puzzle-island is solved, the scene turns into stars which collect in a constellation that forms the actual event that makes up the memory.  It's a unique and engaging method of game play that can be frustrating at times, but also very rewarding at the end.

Integrated seamlessly into this world are very subtle, similarly foggy sound-effects that often clue the player in to what is required in order to proceed in the game.  The characters' footsteps are gentle and crunchy, while the environment SFX are dedicated and understated with no reverb.  The overall effect is intimate and dream-like.

Likewise, the music is mostly atmospheric but contains layers of sound that seem to interact with each other and flow independently, resonating playfully.  Many of these layers seems to be built from the kinds of sounds that one would find at home - pots and pans, wind chimes, and of course a toy piano.  As the game progresses, the music changes from light and playful to dark and foreboding and, in the end, changes to dread as the characters send many levels of a dark, rainy cliff, finally emerging into a thunderstorm on top of the clouds, with reversed sound elements that imply the impending crumbling of their relations when the little boy moves away at the end of the game.  Interestingly, the opening screen of the game actually portends this moment of dread with its rainy scene.

Overall, I felt that the game is, like many of the "experience story" games I enjoy, beautiful and creative, with a somewhat simplistic gameplay.  It does become more intricate along the way, and the final scene, in the clouds among the lightning, has an exquisite amount of impact in the way the world crumbles and tumbles into pieces, with the sound effects of clattering stone kind of shocking and setting you up for the impact of the delivery of the final scene.  The music doesn't play much role in terms of story telling, but contributes to the overall atmospheric effect.

This game is definitely a unique and captivating experience, perfect for the casual player who wants to puzzle solve in different ways, with a simple but moving story that unwraps itself in unexplained ways.