A Garden of Impossible Objects

A Garden of Impossible Objects is a visual novel that explores and makes tangible the experience of bearing witness to a family member’s grief. This game combines thoughtful, vivid writing, graphics, and sound to capture the surreal disappearance of meaning that comes with the death of a loved one.

The writing is wonderful. The evocative description of driving on a dirt road, arcane allusions to the oddities of an expansive garden, a throwaway line hinting at the narrator’s father’s death—everything points at the idea of the blank space, the unknown. On a broad level, the storytelling dances around and then gradually hones in on what’s missing. I found it very affecting as an illustration of how someone’s death is not just the loss of the person, but a million small things in the past, present, and future, and confronting any of those small losses holds open the wound for another moment.

It’s an interesting choice that the grieving person is the narrator’s mother, rather than the narrator themself. Both perspectives could be explored this way, but this one gives the story an extra layer of curiosity and remove.

The listed genre for this story is horror, but my experience of it was more aching and tragic. The visual and symbolic representations of grief felt familiar and natural. It’s weird, but I felt at home in the mystery and tension of the situation. Though abstracted and exaggerated, it all felt very real.

I was about halfway through when I started to suspect we weren’t actually going to see any of the eponymous objects. This VN keeps you at a distance, which reinforces the concepts in the story. We don’t see the objects, and only one is described in any detail. We never get the full context and tone of the relationships (the narrator themselves doesn’t fully understand their mother’s relationship to Carmen). Some of this is vague on purpose, some should probably be clarified a little more: there are times when I couldn’t tell if the back and forth between the narrator and their mother was meant to be playful or tense, e.g.

That distance mostly serves the story, though, because no one in this story is entirely present: not the narrator, who didn’t know Carmen and doesn’t understand the effect Carmen’s death has had on their mother; not their mother, who can’t remember what she’s looking for, who insists she knew all of Carmen despite evidence to the contrary; and not Carmen. Carmen is here, of course. The relationship and spaces we make are a part of us, and those parts don’t disappear when we die. People linger. Part of Carmen IS here. The narrator’s mother says “I can see her… she’s in there. She can hear me,” but then “why can’t she say anything back? Why can she only listen?” That presence is unsettling because it’s a recognizable but unresponsive, already dissipating. That dissipation is the most frightening thing in this haunted house; Carmen’s empty bedroom sends the narrator’s mom running from the house.

What we do see is really lovely. Looking at this VN is a delight. The colors and textures, and surreal collage elements that blend photorealism and almost crayon-like softness, the switch between vague impressions (the surreal garden, the party streamers, the mostly faceless mother against a background made only of shapeless colors) and moments of incredible but meaningless specificity (a worn, stained wood step; ductwork and wires), it all heightens the sense of being only partially present in a place or situation.

There were places where the writing didn’t quite work for me, where it overplays its hand, particularly this passage: “Was I there, too? At the jaws of the labyrinth? I think I was. The bramble was enough to cover the whole world. The orchestra played at a distance. There were no birds in the sky. And yet, even in hell there were surprises.” That ‘and yet’ will bug me, and some of the metaphors are too on the nose (“She hid everything in her maze”; the eclipse, an absence that you can’t look at directly, that defamiliarizes the world around you). And yet… this VN works far more often than it doesn’t, and the visual presentation alone is worth the short time it takes to read.