The Gardens Between's prototype was inspired by Minority Report

The Gardens Between is an extremely unique puzzle game that has lead many to wonder just how the dev team came up with the idea. In an interview with Gamasutra, Simon Joslin and Matt Clark at developer The Voxel Agents explained where the original idea came from.

The original prototype for the game was based around the scene from Minority Report when Tom Cruise is scrubbing backwards and forwards in a memory looking for clues. The very early puzzle prototypes were heavily inspired by hidden object games, and the idea of exploring mini-stories in the scene to find the clues - kind of like picture books when you were a kid, where the longer you look at the images, the more fine detail you see. Each image is full of tiny potential stories - so we said “what if they could be animated!?”