The Gardens Between On Android Is Still Beautiful

The Gardens Between is a puzzle game which was released in late 2018. At the time of launch, the game from developer The Voxel Agents received a favorable review from yours truly and that verdict still stands, playing through the Android version. You can check out The Garden Between PC review.

 

For context, The Gardens Between centers around the story of two children, Arina and Frendt, as they revolve around memorable moments in their friendship. Stages are set up in pastel-shaded dioramas, which rotate around as the characters move through them. This back and forth mechanism is used to justify time and space manipulation that makes up the game's puzzle elements. Some objects in the world follow the flow of time, while others can act independently or trigger a rift in the space continuum. Gameplay sounds complicated, but the execution is fairly elegant and just requires some good concentration, to follow all moving parts.

The Android version naturally uses the touchscreen to maneuver the two kids, as they explore the items that solidified their bonds. The circular world is littered with objects of exaggerated size that let environmental storytelling do all the work. Given that the game can use both portrait and landscape mode, it facilitates how players want to overlook the world, as the protagonists play with old computers, seesaws and a whole treefort. Particularly comforting is the amount of detail The Gardens Between offers for compatibility. There are plenty of resolution modes, as well as a choice between 30 or 60 frames per second (fps), though 30 fps seems to cause some inconsistency in more illustrious scenes. The compressed size of the game on a phone screen also makes the soft, nostalgic playfield look crisp, certainly on higher performance options.

Lastly, the mobile version of The Gardens Between is also cheaper than its counterparts, as is customary for the platform. Paying less for the same, portable version of a compelling, contained experience can only be seen as a positive. These two kids go through some events and it's still worth finding out about those events, for anyone who wants some time away from reality. Even having played the whole thing before, the natural narrative was still ingenious enough to enjoy again. The story isn't all sunshine, soda and chips, but neither is life. A global launch for The Gardens Between on Android follows this summer.
 

Daav Valentaten, NoobFeed
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