Fancy temporal machinations aside, the game is about the bond between two children, Arina and Frendt, the experiences they have shared and the things they must leave behind. It begins with a long, gloomy silence in a treehouse, a metro train screaming across the cityscape to the rear. Then it whisks you away from all that, away from the harshness of the urban night, to a dreamy archipelago under alien stars - the treehouse now a boat which carries the children from island to island.
You don't control the characters themselves. Instead, you tilt the stick to advance or rewind the timeline. Given a clear path your charges will amble to the top of their own accord, the camera circling to keep them in view as they trot along grassy paths and hop between boulders. There's no dialogue, but the animations speak volumes about each protagonist. Arina is bolder, brasher, more inclined to stride ahead. Frendt is a bit of a space cadet, unable to resist tugging at things or wandering off into the crannies while Arina looks on patiently with folded arms.
As the children clamber around each island, they'll encounter obstacles they can't pass - obstacles beyond which time cannot advance. There's the odd wall of purple mist, and bridges of the same substance that disintegrate in the lamp's glow, forcing you to douse it to proceed. There are dusky seedpods that steal away the lamplight as though sucking the full stop off the end of a sentence. In each case, you'll need to wind back the gears and look for the objects you can change, opportunities to step just a little outside the progress of the memory and tinker with its clockwork.
If they function well enough as puzzle props, the blocks are a little dissatisfying for their (as far as I can see) lack of a personal connection to the characters. More diverting are the conundrums that involve tweaks to the objects each memory is associated with - fat keypads you can trample over to bash something out on a nearby screen, dinosaur skeletons from museum exhibits that collapse and reassemble, altering the lay of the land, and telescopes that swivel on their tripods, carrying the sky along with them.
There are moments of real delight as you work out exactly what you can mess with, pursuing the surprisingly elaborate chains of cause and effect that stretch behind what is ostensibly just a cutscene you can pause and rewind. In a predictable but bearable show of quintessentially "indie" nostalgia, some of the best setups involve pieces of ancient gaming hardware, canted across the path like ritual obelisks. I won't spoil it, but the pick of the litter involves working out how to manipulate something non-linear while reckoning with a control scheme that only lets characters travel in two directions.
The characterisation - and I should probably remind you at this point that I am a miserable old crank - is perhaps a little too sweet-natured for its own good. In my experience, at least, best friendships are rarely this untroubled; they are also about arguments and misunderstandings, estrangements that slowly evaporate, none of which find its way into The Gardens Between. There are gloomier moments, in fairness, and there is nothing wrong in itself with preferring the sunshine to the rain, but I do think there's a missed opportunity here. With their stops and starts, their cracking and reassembling of overlapping timelines, the puzzles might have explored moments of discord between the characters - moments when they were, if not at odds, at least out of synch. Without that element of friction, the game can feel a little twee.
The puzzles, moreover, lose their novelty towards the finale, and none of them will preoccupy you for long. It's always nice when games don't outstay their welcome in this, the age of Endless Content, but some of the more inspired individual concepts here are dispensed with far too quickly. Still, The Gardens Between is lovely for as long as it lasts. If time is a composite of the time signatures objects weave about them, this one is valuable for how it slows everything down without putting you to sleep. I found it engrossing but also soothing, like the waltz of leaves on a windy street.
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