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Review
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.
