Biggest discounts, free games, and limited-time offers across every major gaming store.
Never pay full price again.
Overview
The Gardens Between is a puzzle adventure game built around a single, elegant mechanic: controlling the flow of time. Players don't move the two protagonists, Arina and Frendt, directly. Instead, they scrub time forward and backward to manipulate events in each garden island, guiding a lantern of light to its destination while solving the environmental puzzles that stand in the way. The result is something that feels less like a traditional puzzle game and more like an interactive short story.
The Voxel Agents, a Melbourne studio founded in 2009, built the entire experience around this constraint. Every garden island represents a memory from Arina and Frendt's friendship, assembled from recognizable childhood objects: a garden hose, a television set, a tent made from bedsheets. The puzzle design and the narrative are inseparable, which is rare even among the best indie puzzle games.
How does the time-manipulation mechanic actually work?
The core loop is straightforward to grasp but takes real thought to execute. Moving the analog stick (or swiping, on mobile) scrubs time in either direction. Arina and Frendt walk forward when time moves forward, and retrace their steps when it rewinds. Objects in the environment react independently to time, which is where the puzzles live.
Key mechanics include:
- Rewinding time to reset object states
- Isolating specific items from the time flow
- Carrying light sources past obstacles
- Triggering environmental interactions in precise sequences
- Reading each island's layout to find the correct order of operations
The puzzles never overstay their welcome. Each island is compact, and the difficulty curve is gentle enough that the game rarely frustrates. That's a deliberate design choice: The Gardens Between prioritizes the emotional experience over mechanical challenge.
World and setting
Every garden island is constructed from the detritus of childhood. A treehouse. A backyard swimming pool. The objects are mundane, but their arrangement is surreal, floating in dark voids or suspended above impossible vistas. The art direction leans into this contrast hard, and it pays off.
The visual style sits somewhere between a pop-up book and a diorama. Colors are warm but not saccharine, and the scale of each island gives the game a toylike quality that reinforces the memory-as-object metaphor running through the whole thing. The Voxel Agents clearly understood that the setting needed to do narrative work, not just provide a backdrop.
Visual and audio design
The art is striking, but the soundtrack is what elevates The Gardens Between into something memorable. The ambient score shifts with each island, underscoring the emotional arc without ever spelling it out. The Voxel Agents released a full ambient slow trailer specifically to highlight the music, which tells you something about how central it is to the experience.
The game has been selected and featured at events including Indie MEGABOOTH at PAX East, Out of Index, ACMI, and BIC Fest, which reflects the attention the art and audio design attracted from the broader games community.
Impact and legacy
The Gardens Between is available on virtually every major platform: Windows, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, iOS, Android, and macOS. A VR companion experience, Hidden Memories of The Gardens Between, has since launched on Meta Quest, extending the world further.
For a puzzle adventure game running roughly two to three hours, The Gardens Between accomplishes something most games three times its length fail to do: it leaves a specific emotional impression that's hard to shake. The time-manipulation mechanic is the hook, but the friendship at the center of the story is why the game gets remembered.