The Gardens Between
I recently finished playing a lovely puzzle game: The Gardens Between. It’s a sweet, wordless game about friendship and memory, available on a bunch of different platforms, including iOS and Steam.
The game starts with two kids who are friends (and next-door neighbors), Arina and Frendt (I read them as being a white girl and boy, but I’m not sure whether that’s the designers’ intent), in their treehouse on a rainy night. They then find themselves transported to a series of islands in which you can explore their memories using a nifty interface that lets you move them forward and backward in time “to solve puzzles and illuminate threads of a bittersweet narrative,” as the game’s website puts it.
The puzzles are mostly pretty straightforward. There are two specific mechanics that come up partway through the game that I would never have figured out on my own (I consulted a cheat page for those), but other than that I found the puzzles easy to solve. But the graphics are great, the rewind-time mechanic is really cool, and the story is sweet.
Recommended, especially on a large tablet with headphones or other good audio.
(Quasi-spoiler in a comment on this post.)
