The Garden Between is an adventure game where you play as two friends traversing through strange landscapes created from the fragments of their joint past. The important events in their relationship become worlds to explore, worlds where the characters control the flow of time and can cause things to happen in different ways to open new paths.
The Good
- Simple with depth: The controls for The Gardens Between are incredibly simple: press left and right to move and occasionally press an interaction button. The complexity lies in that moving right makes time move forward while moving left rewinds. From the simplest of levels to the most complex, you’ll be moving left and right to find the right spot to effect a change and open the way to the end. As new mechanics come into play, including some hotspots where your characters stop but everything else moves forward or backwards in time, the simple controls open the way to some really clever puzzles. I absolutely love this design.
- Take your Time: One of the benefits of the level-based design of The Gardens Between is that it’s perfect for quick and short play sessions. As I played the game for this review, I found that it was super easy to leave the game for a while and then come back without feeling like I was lost, especially with regards to the plot, as every stage is merely a fragment of the narrative.
The Bad
- Repetitive Music: The music in The Gardens Between is simple, often comprised of a couple of tones. While most of the compositions are rather relaxing, there is little variety in the melodies, making them forgettable at best and irritating at worst, and I did find some of them annoying.
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