Kotaku’s Nathan Grayson got some hands-on play time with The Voxel Agents‘ The Gardens Between at PAX West and was so impressed that he named it one of the coolest indie games at the show.
Grayson notes that while the player shifts time backwards and forwards with a single button in order to move Arina and Frendt through a series of island gardens, the game is anything but simple and features puzzles that are real mind benders. The final puzzle in the PAX West demo proved to be so challenging, in fact, that Grayson didn’t finish it. He describes one brain teaser that not only made him think, but helped frame what he calls the “mechanical language” of The Gardens Between:
For example, one surreal landscape I played on contained a giant plank that only the young girl could leap onto. In order to help her friend up, I had to rapidly make time move forward and backward so that she would continually leap atop a saw, slowly propelling it through the plank and cutting off a piece to create a ramp. It was a clever little puzzle that took me a bit, but it offered a great “eureka” moment and went a long way toward teaching me the game’s unique mechanical language.
The Gardens Between will release on Steam for PC and Mac early next year.
