A Short But Moving Indie Gem

Hidden Memories of The Gardens Between is a moving story about childhood best friends, offering an enjoyable VR take on the flatscreen indie puzzler. Read on for our full review.

If you’re someone who played 2018’s The Gardens Between on flatscreen platforms, Hidden Memories is a curious expansion on a story I considered one and done. It’s more of an expanded retread than a sequel, adding a new opening decades later that quickly returns to familiar ground. These new additions may not warrant a second playthrough, yet this VR adaptation still delivers a beautiful tale.

Exploring this world from a third-person perspective, you’re tasked with manipulating time to guide Arina and Frendt across each island, which catchingly mixes gorgeous scenery with everyday objects. Hidden Memories of The Gardens Between successfully invokes childhood nostalgia through colorful yet charmingly surreal imagery, whether that’s the oversized sofa with a popcorn bowl atop a rock formation or seeing giant bicycles in the distance.

Everything is managed through a pleasingly straightforward control scheme, and you don’t directly move each character across each environment. Instead, you alter the flow of time by moving your hand right (accelerating) or left (reversing). Arina and Frendt both follow a pre-determined course with some potential diverging paths depending on your inputs.

Hand-tracking controls feel like a natural fit for this minimalist scheme and use a pinch motion to interact with objects, while motion controllers simply require a trigger press. It’s comfortably played with one hand too, making this an ideal choice if accessibility is a concern. Pinching items to interact with them without dragging your hand in a set direction feels easy enough too, though VR interactivity is rather basic.

Your goal is to transport a pink orb to a portal at each island’s peak using your lantern, gradually introducing more complex mechanics. For example, some flowers contain a required orb you can use to activate a bridge. Other flowers might automatically absorb your orbs if you walk past them, leaving you with no immediate means of getting another. That can be a problem if, say, you encounter a dark cloud that’s only crossable with a light source. Likewise, some cloud paths can only be walked over without an orb.

There’s a fair difficulty curve that gets increasingly more challenging, and these levels remain well designed (usually) with an identifiable logic to solving them. Paying close attention is crucial as some clues are more obvious than others. Annoyingly, several levels midway through would leave me feeling stumped on what I’m supposed to do. Eventually figuring out the solution in those moments generally feels more frustrating than rewarding.

One of the most significant changes in Hidden Memories of The Gardens Between is how each island now appears like a rotatable diorama where you grab the base to change your viewpoint. This neatly incorporates mixed reality support on Quest 3, which has become my preferred way to play, and Hidden Memories also includes optional up-close views in fully immersive environments only.

These changing viewpoints don’t affect the puzzles in a meaningful sense, and it’s largely the same beautiful game we previously saw seven years ago. Unfortunately, getting up close highlights how the resolution isn’t particularly sharp on Quest 3. There’s also a slightly jarring black border that you see if you move too far out when using a stationary boundary, which isn’t great. While we previewed this on Steam, we’ve not received access to the full PC VR edition yet, so I can’t fairly compare the two.

Much like before, this short campaign needs roughly 3-4 hours and doesn’t outstay its welcome. Hidden Memories adds some welcome replayability across each stage with new collectible items that go into Arina’s diary, giving you a new scene that helps us learn more about the pair. Finding the complete set can require messing around with items, like finding a ticket inside a chocolate wrapper, which is nice since it becomes a more involved process than just hide-and-seek.

Still, this new feature feels rather minimal and I’m not naturally inclined to find all the items. It’s moments like this where Hidden Memories’ flatscreen roots are apparent. Even so, I’m pleased to see The Voxel Agents further develop Arina and Frendt across this wordless story. The ending is relatively abrupt, and I’ll update this if I learn there’s a new or expanded ending after collecting all the items. Nonetheless, this conclusion leaves me feeling emotional.

Hidden Memories of The Gardens Between Review – Final Verdict

While you can tell this wasn’t initially designed for VR or mixed reality, Hidden Memories of The Gardens Between is a captivating journey that touchingly portrays the familiar pain of a friend moving away. This houses a compelling tale about childhood imagination that’s beautifully surreal, and taking the diorama approach introduces an intriguing perspective to this existing story.

Several issues keep this from becoming an essential recommendation, however: the Quest 3 resolution isn’t the sharpest, a few levels become rather frustrating, and the expanded content isn’t enough if you previously beat the original game. Still, The Voxel Agents largely does this chilled-out puzzle adventure justice in VR, and it’s worth considering if you’re after something different.

UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines.