Grasping The Ephemeral Analogue In Hidden Memories of the Gardens Between

By Diego Nicolás Argüello | August 8, 2025 | 2:00pm

Video Games Features Virtual Reality

Grasping The Ephemeral Analogue In Hidden Memories of the Gardens Between

Every time I take off the headset from my face, I look at my hands. I push my fingers onto my palms to grasp my skin, and repeatedly clench my fist a few times. It’s a silly yet necessary reality-check moment after using them to navigate floating screens in my living room. It’s even more poignant after spending time inside Hidden Memories of the Gardens Between, where you’re surrounded by virtual dioramas built around analogue mementos.

Released this week for Meta headsets, this VR rendition of 2018’s The Gardens Between remains largely similar to the game I reviewed seven years ago. It’s a puzzle adventure that follows best friends Arina and Frendt, who sit down to reminisce about the childhood they spent together. The trip down memory lane is represented in a series of micro worlds, capturing an assortment of moments: building a house tree, watching movies under a blanket fort, repairing a bike. As the player, you move each world back and forth, rewinding time, as the characters follow set paths carrying a light inside a lantern from point A to B.

The minimalistic, tranquil ambiance is still present, but the context is different. Hidden Memories of the Gardens Between starts two decades later with Frendt finding Arina’s diary while moving house. This happens as he’s deciding which items from his attic to pack and which ones to donate. You see objects from his childhood—a kids’ synthesizer, a small tricycle—but also remnants of the person he was during the past few years. A tennis racket, trophies, two surfboards, a VHS tape. Each memento represents bygone moments and people, as well as the passage of time. Glancing at a phone next to the moving box where Frendt finds the diary, however, I saw a different underlying context—retreading my steps seven years later, now in virtual reality, these memories are a cautionary tale of the omnipresence of technology in our everyday lives.

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You can play Hidden Memories of the Gardens Between traditionally, holding a controller in each hand, but this revision also supports hand tracking. Opting for the latter has you pinching your fingers in mid-air to grab the scene, and then moving sideways to rewind back and forth. There’s also an option for the perspective, one being closer and fully within the game, while the other is a step back, using mixed reality to display the entirety of the dioramas in front of you.

Sure, hand tracking is largely gimmicky and far from infallible. My hands kept getting stuck to the boundaries of each scene, and I accidentally pulled them toward my body and far away constantly. When you’re not interrupted by these issues and your mind can fully buy into the illusion, however, the magic effect of VR sets in. I grab a saw and move my arm to cut logs to rebuild the memory of a tree house. I get up from my couch to hammer in nails. I use a brush to temporarily paint the surfaces of the diorama as Frendt and Arina are frozen in place.

But my actions are all pre-programmed. I’m only afforded as much liberty as the devs intended the player to have. I might be using my hands, but these memories aren’t mine, nor do I have actual control over them. Arina doesn’t know it was me who manipulated time so she could repeatedly jump on top of a log stuck in a saw, applying enough force to split it and build a bridge. I can’t feel the tacticity of the remote when Frendt walks by and turns the TV on for a puzzle. No matter how hard Hidden Memories of the Gardens Between tries, my presence is superficial, and the analogue memorabilia escapes my grasp.

Hidden Memories of the Gardens Between

During the past two years, getting into VR has given me plenty of illusions to fall for. Some try to mimic realism to a painstaking degree. In The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, for example, shoving a knife into a zombie’s head isn’t enough to kill them—you have to firmly clench your hand around the controller and repeat the gesture with force, the feedback of a stronger vibration giving you the indication that you’ve successfully plunged into the skull. Mundane actions are also thrown into the mix, such as putting a cigarette close to your face and having it sit on your mouth. Find a working Zippo and you can even light it.

Amidst the abundance of first-person shooters, there are also experiences that, trying to sound like I’m playing the marketing gallery, can’t be properly described in words. Thrasher, which was mainly developed by the artist and composer of Thumper, makes a strong case for hand tracking, as it has you guiding a psychedelic eel through a series of vibrant, pulsating levels with just one hand. Rez Infinite’s Area X takes the concept of the original game and removes the rails, allowing for 360 movement. It’s a short level that you can tackle in 20 minutes. But it’s transformative. The developer’s obsession with synesthesia is palpable, but the hardware plays a big role in it as well. With a PlayStation VR2, you can opt for using eye tracking to aim at enemies and guide the avatar’s direction. It’s a wondrous tech demo, and one that I wish everyone could experience for themselves.

The Gardens Between was released a year before the launch of the Oculus Quest. VR has evolved substantially since, offering better fidelity and ergonomics, albeit without truly breaking into the mass market, thanks to a high entry barrier in terms of cost and whether or not you can stomach using the headset for long periods of time without experiencing motion sickness. Developing games for VR only heightens the latter, especially for newcomers, while hardware, alongside the distinct technology across different headsets, also brings an assortment of issues and considerations to take into account.

The prospect of VR, even while the tech was in its infancy, always sounded enticing to me. Now, in 2025, the future seems compromised by the companies manufacturing the headsets themselves, as well as the ecosystems around them. There were plenty of notable releases last year, but toward the last leg, 2024 felt like a swansong after numerous layoffs and studio closures, companies like Sony reportedly pausing production of headsets, and Meta pushing for faux promises of a metaverse. Technology like hand tracking and mixed reality are interesting when put to good use, but before I can access them, the main page that appears when I boot up my Meta Quest paints a grim picture, showing an array of games with generative AI art and categories like “apps to work in VR” being placed front and center.

Despite the corporatization of VR and its myriad of issues, it’s commendable to find experiences that were made with a clear intent to leave a lasting memory in the player. The Hidden Memories of the Gardens Between gave me a space of remembrance for the tenderness of the original release. It also led me to reflect on the ways in which companies keep pushing technology with the intent to entrap us in algorithms and digitize our actions. The prospect of finding a handwritten diary two decades from now grows more unlikely by the day.

Last week, I gifted one of my siblings a CD for his birthday. He’s been slowly building a collection for the past few years, and finally purchased a portable player months ago. While he still streams music via Bluetooth on occasion, more often than not, you’ll find him carrying around a handful of CDs with him whenever he goes out. There’s a clear nostalgia factor involved—and some companies definitely capitalize on it in ill-suited ways—but also curiosity, one that can spark a pursuit of physical media. This preservation, even on a small scale, is important. Those CDs will be there for him with enough care, and the songs will forever be associated with memories of moments and people. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to continue using my Meta Quest. It’s bound to eventually lose official support, and there may come a time when I’m unable to re-download the digital games in my library. Despite using my hands, my grasp can only get so far. No matter how close I put a brush to my face, I can’t sense the smell of fresh paint.

Diego Nicolás Argüello is a freelance journalist from Argentina who has learned English thanks to videogames. You can read his work in places like Polygon, the New York Times, The Verge, and more. You can also find him on Bluesky.