The Gardens Between - Friends Apart, Memories Remain

I spent the past couple weeks blowing though Red Dead Redemption II and all I wanted to do afterwards was play a game where I could take it easy and simply enjoy it because after RDR2, I had a crave for simple control schemes and something enjoyable that I could take in easily.

I came across The Gardens Between, developed by The Voxel Agents, through the Xbox Game Pass catalog and was immediately intrigued by its vivid art style and soothing color palette.

Moments upon playing this game, I knew it was exactly the game I needed.

The story is told without text or dialogue to go off of but instead told visually through the game's puzzles, representing memories of the two main characters. Before moving away and saying goodbye, Frendt and Arina traverse through these garden islands which represent the fond memories they've spent together as friends.

The game essentially uses two buttons. You use the analog stick to manipulate time and then the A button to have the characters interact with the world.

Instead of controlling where the characters move, you have to move time forward and backwards to affect the world around. Objects from Frendt and Arina's past are scattered throughout the gardens and their relationship to the puzzles gets more and more interesting as the game goes on.

At first, the puzzles are pretty straight-forward and that's to be expected. The goal of every level is to bring a lit lantern to the top/bottom of the garden.

Then the game starts introducing black holes that steal the light from the lantern or cloudy pathways that only appear without any light in the lantern and that's when the puzzles started to get interesting.

The game starts introducing puzzles that can only be solved by moving time back and forth in a specific sequence or by holding time in a very specific moment.

Some of these moments consist of having to channel a bolt of lightning into a TV's power cord or keep a water droplet frozen in time to conduct electricity to a lamp.

These parts of the game gave me that "a-ha" reaction and by the game's final moments, you'll be familiar with how the game wants you to interact with time.

The Gardens Between isn't a very long game, nor should it be because I thought it lasted the perfect amount of time. Nor is the game super challenging or too taxing to the brain but is perfect for anybody who's looking for a game with beautiful presentation and an adventure simple enough to grasp.

I spent the past couple mornings loading up this game and just enjoying the game's soundtrack and soothing atmosphere. Highly recommend playing this game with the controller in one hand and a cup of freshly brewed coffee in the other- after all, this game only uses two buttons.

After beating The Gardens Between, I've gotten around to finally playing Fallout 4, as sort of my entry into the Fallout franchise. As a Skyrim fan, I've had no problem getting used to the game's mechanics considering Fallout and Elder Scrolls are both developed by Bethesda and share a lot of the same DNA. Anyways, I'm gonna go now. I don't really have much else to say.