I've been reading a lot lately about the different ways we imagine time, and one, rather obvious thing I've belatedly realised is that we do not actually perceive time at all, but matter in motion. Time is not a tangible entity whistling past, an arrow through the present's heart, but the shifting sum of the timeframes created by the objects around us: sunrise and fall, the tumbling of popcorn from an upturned bowl, the tickle of drums in a passerby's headphones, the bobbing of cans in a flood. An affectionate, if slightly ephemeral puzzler from Australian indie The Voxel Agents, The Gardens Between revels in this thought. It represents the past as a series of spinning island dioramas, at once unearthly and ordinary, made up of objects you must meddle with to allow time as a whole to play out.
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.
Each level is a puzzle consisting of objects from Arina and Frendt's memories - from beachballs and hosepipes to paint buckets and sofa cushion fortresses, the debris of childhood play swollen in hindsight to elephantine proportions. Your goal in each case is to kindle the lantern Arina carries and place it on a plinth at the summit, whereupon the view sweeps upward to reveal the event each island is based on, preserved forever as a constellation.
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