A Garden of Impossible Objects

Sometimes I worry that, for all that I try to have recourse to some consistent albeit subjective standards as I write these reviews, actually that’s all just post-hoc justification and the reasons why I like something or don’t click with it are just ineffable and inexpressible. This worry is especially sharp when I play a game soon after another that’s superficially similar, but which lands entirely differently despite all that. So it is with A Garden of Impossible Objects, a short kinetic novel that boasts atmospheric visuals and a compelling premise, but doesn’t provide a ton of in-depth exploration or plot development. So far so my baby needs blood, but while I thought that game really could have been stronger if it had elaborated upon its setup, I’m perfectly content with the glimpses Impossible Objects offers.

If it is just elephants all the way down, there’s not much point either to writing or reading these things, so we might as well assume that there’s a reason for that. One reason for the difference might be that Impossible Objects’ palette is reasonably broad – that applies literally, as rather than being uniformly a chilly blue, the visuals here provide a varied feast. The game opens with the arresting image of an annular eclipse, and each chapter is interspersed with hyperdetailed images of constellations, but most of the graphics illustrate the eponymous garden (and attached house), where the protagonist’s recently-deceased aunt carefully nurtured plants of all kinds until they ran riot, blooming and fecund. There are pseudo-3d effects (achieved I think through parallax scrolling) and subtle touches of animation, that make the lush visuals even more engaging.

The writing is also very impressive – and I don’t just mean the prose and dialogue are evocative and ring true (though they are, and they do), but that very careful attention has been paid to match the words to the format. I often find visual novels a little frustrating because you need to do so much clicking to advance through the story a sentence or two at a time, but here, almost every short bit of text provides a compelling detail, a nugget of characterization, or an enticing development of the narrative, or both, rather than depending for their impact on something you might not get to for two or three more clicks.

Like, here’s a relatively simple bit where your mom (she’s the reason you’re there, looking for some stuff of hers your aunt didn’t return before her death) opens up the house:

I remember standing next to Mom as she fiddled with the key to unlock the front door.

Carmen didn’t do locks, but following her death someone had put one there.

I’m not entirely sure who.

For nearly a whole day before leaving, Mom was on the phone.

I don’t know who she was talking to.

I didn’t listen in.

As to the substance here, I didn’t find that those enticing details cohered into a single interpretation of what, exactly, the aunt’s deal was, where, if anywhere, the mom’s stuff had been hidden, and what the heck was going on with that eerie basement. And the game does just kind of end, rather than building to a conventional narrative payoff. Here, again, though, I’m eager to give Impossible Objects a pass. The major theme here is grief, and the truth is that most of the time grief is just about alienating vibes – the death of a loved one means that you’re not going to get answers or resolution to any outstanding questions or business you had with them, it’s all just over, and that feels bad and weird. Also, the grief is really a second-order affair – the protagonist didn’t have a close relationship with the aunt, so they’re mostly observing their mom, trying in vain to understand what she’s feeling and why. This displacement of mediated emotions also resonates with the subject-matter of the story, which sees you looking through the physical detritus of the aunt’s life, using the lens of a few scant memories to try (largely in vain) to understand what these scattered objects have to say about her. Filling in the details or creating a too-neat wrap-up to the story would betray the whole theme.

So yeah, those are my reasons, though I’m not sure how convincingly they distinguish A Garden of Impossible Objects from similarly-elliptical games I’ve bounced off. Maybe it is all irrational, my judgments simply downstream of how much sleep I got the night before I played a game, or whether I was hungry or thirsty or reminded of something else, good or bad. Or maybe it’s that there are no firm, fixed rules in IF: implementation and inspiration will always trump rules of thumb, and even stuff that doesn’t immediately appeal to me can nonetheless grab me by the heart-strings once I get into it. That’s a big part of what I love about IF, and a good note too, I think, on which to close the book on this year’s review-a-thon!