Watch this garden grow

The brilliant adventure game The Gardens Between may be best known for cleverly turning time into a puzzle-solving tool. But this 2019 Apple Design Award winner wasn’t built around that clever twist; it was driven by its rich visuals.

“The gameplay generally follows the art,” says Simon Joslin, cofounder of development studio Voxel Agents. “Telling a story was important to us.”

Joslin began developing the visual style with cofounder Matthew Clark along with lead artist Jonathan Swanson, an illustrator who’d never made a game before. 

“We focused on fairy tales because they are approachable and accessible,” Joslin says. “The ideas that attracted us at the start were a juxtaposition between enormous everyday objects and a kind of fantasy, dreamlike world.”

That’s exactly what players encounter in one of the team’s favourite levels – dubbed Console – which finds young heroes Arina and Frendt navigating an island littered with oversized VCRs, classic gaming hardware and other ’80s-era electronics.

Things didn’t click as quickly with the ambitious Dinosaur level.

“We knew the story we wanted to tell: The two characters trespass at a museum and there’s a big dinosaur skeleton. That’s the visual concept, but we had no idea what the actual gameplay was going to be with the dinosaur,” says Joslin.

Eventually the team decided to retrofit the puzzle to the art design: They let players toy with time to deconstruct and reassemble the prehistoric exhibit.

The team was consistently adamant about sticking to an artistic vision for a level, but there were exceptions. 

“The Deep Drain level changed a lot,” Joslin says. “We wanted to have an internal camera spinning around, facing outward, but we ended up moving the camera to the outside.

“It was a really good idea, but in practice it was hard to see the bits that made it cool,” he adds.

The Gardens Between

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