The studio behind the dream
The Gardens Between World is the official Australian portal for The Gardens Between — a game built in Melbourne by The Voxel Agents, a small team with an outsized love for quiet, clever storytelling.
A Melbourne indie studio with a decade of quiet hits
The Voxel Agents was founded in Melbourne in 2009 by three friends who believed mobile games could be more than distractions. Their early train-set puzzlers paid the rent; The Gardens Between was the game they had always wanted to make — four years of prototyping, scrapping and rebuilding until time itself behaved.
The studio remains deliberately small. Everyone touches design, everyone playtests, and nobody ships a puzzle they would not want photographed on a bookshelf.
Puzzle pedigree
Train Conductor and Puzzle Retreat taught the studio how a simple gesture can carry an entire game.
Small on purpose
A core team of designers, artists and engineers who share one desk and one stubborn standard.
How the Gardens began
Six panels from the project's life — from a napkin sketch at a Fitzroy café to an Apple keynote stage.
The original sketch was a spiral: a whole childhood wound around a single lamppost. Time moved around the kids, never through them — that one drawing survived four years of development unchanged.
The first prototype let you rewind a bouncing basketball. Players spent twenty minutes just un-bouncing it. The team knew immediately they had found the game's grammar.
The Gardens Between launched in September 2018 and was featured on stage by Apple within weeks. The emails the studio still treasures most are from parents who played it with their kids.
Tapes from the studio floor
During development the team kept an audio diary — design arguments, breakthroughs at 2 AM, and the week the ending made a playtester cry in the best way. Excerpts are archived here for the curious.
- Diary 02 — Why no dialogue6:14
- Diary 11 — Killing our favourite puzzle8:02
- Diary 19 — The ending, take four11:37
From the archive
A weekend jam build called "Time Fishing" lets players drag a level's history like a video scrub bar.
The friendship theme locks in after the team interviews each other about their own childhood neighbours.
The isometric "diorama" look ships: every island built to feel like a keepsake on a shelf.
Launch across PC, console and mobile; the game sweeps Australian and international indie awards.
The cabinet in the corner of the office
The studio insists the awards live next to the kettle so the kettle doesn't get jealous.
Apple Design Award
Honoured for innovation in interaction — the time-scrub gesture that carries the entire game.
AGDA Game of the Year
Australian Game Developer Awards — the industry's own vote for the country's best release.
IMGA Grand Prix
International Mobile Gaming Awards top prize, judged by press and players across 40 countries.
BAFTA Nominee
Nominated among the year's finest — a badge the team wears with quiet pride.
Also featured: Google Play Indie Games Festival showcase · PAX Aus Indie Showcase · SXSW Gaming nominee
Press & Creator Kit
Every island, a keepsake
The Gardens Between looks the way a memory feels — warm at the edges, impossible in the middle. Artists built each island as a physical-feeling diorama, then broke its geometry just enough to feel dreamed rather than made.
- Twenty islands, each one a self-contained keepsake
- Hand-placed lighting on every altar and lamppost
- Zero loading screens inside a level — the world just flows
Three rules the studio lives by
Respect the hour
A game that costs two hours should give back more than it takes. We cut everything that asks for time without earning it.
Wonder over noise
No pop-ups, no currencies, no FOMO. If a mechanic doesn't serve the memory, it doesn't ship.
Players are people
Support answered by humans, refunds without arguments, updates that respect the game you bought.
We make small games about big feelings — and we'd rather ship one perfect evening than a hundred forgettable hours.— The Voxel Agents, studio manifesto
The people behind the lantern
Small enough to share one whiteboard. Stubborn enough to spend four years on a two-hour game.
Design & Direction
Level grammar, puzzle pacing and the discipline to delete anything clever-but-cold.
Art & Animation
Dioramas, hand-placed light and the characters who say everything without a single word.
Sound & Music
Tim Shiel's remembered-melody score plus the weather, cicadas and trams of Melbourne itself.
Play what we spent four years making
The whole dream — twenty islands, one storm, zero filler — for less than a cinema ticket.