[Edited for grammar]
As others have pointed out, this game is short. If you don't want to play a game you could ostensibly finish in 20 minutes your first try, look elsewhere. Now, a game's length is not an indicator of its quality; games as disparate as Pacman and Dys4ia accomplish a great deal with a brief playtime. The issue with Gardenarium is that it does not do enough meaningful things with the duration that the player spends with it.
Gardenarium has you climb Seussian hillside, collecting trash that causes the landscape to populate with vegetation. Along the way you meet a few nonsequitor characters who tell abridged tales of their life. The game has an abrupt ending where the gameplay perspective changes and asks the player to wander around.
Despite my dry description, there's some actual intrigue here. The aesthetic to Gardenarium is utterly psychedelic, as alien plants pulse and throb with gorgeously animated high-resolution sprites. The flora also grows in amazing patterns that track your movement, similar to the flowers that grow around Ameratsu in Okami. The few charcters you meet also have quite a bit of personality, and some of their lines allude to tragic and humorous anecdotes. The switch of perspective is also an amazing concept for a game mechanic, not unlike what was accomplished by Super Paper Mario, but the promise of toggling between two and three dimensional planes was not used for any kind of clever transdimensional level design. A pity, really.
It's entirely possible that there's some sort of obtuse hidden content that extends the experience past the apparent ending, but I wasn't able to unearth it. On the contrary, there's a lot suggest that this game was intended as more of a playable pitch for a more complete game, or maybe even a portfolio piece. The animation included is obviously very time-intensive to produce, yet the world has little to explore or do in it. The endgame is an interesting concept, but doesn't seem to expand the the game in any meaningful or mechanically satisfying way. Even the vauge theme of corporate disillusionment murmered by the cast doesn't seem very well fleshed out. The game very much feels like it's less than the sum of its parts, as the each individual component seems too compromised.
I ultimately enjoyed the time I spent with this game just because I'm an animation nut, and I'll let the developer keep my money out of appreciation for their craft. That said, I would not recommend the game unless you can't get enough of its visual style. To the developers, I hope you continue animating and eagerly await your future output!
