The Garden
Level 2 — daylight, overgrown hedges and things that were once tended
You escape the Castle and step into light. The Garden is the game's exhale: a vast estate garden that someone laid out with enormous care and then abandoned for long enough that the design is barely readable. Straight formal avenues dissolve into thicket, a fountain still runs into a basin full of leaves, and the hedges have grown high enough to become walls. It looks safe. It is not measurably safer than the Castle — the doors are still coin flips — but for the first time you can see the sky.
What the level looks like
The Garden is organised as a series of small worlds inside one estate: a formal French parterre, a tulip bed gone feral, a pond with a rotting jetty, a tropical greenhouse whose glass is mostly gone, an orchard, a scarecrow field, a thorn wall, a grotto, a stone bridge and a treehouse nobody has climbed in years.
The palette opens up completely compared with the Castle: greens, wet stone, glass reflections, a low sun. The music follows, trading the keep's cramped low notes for something wider and more open.
Several rooms hint that the estate was inhabited recently enough for the traces to still be fresh — a dog, a unicorn statue, a hunting lodge — without ever telling you who lived there.
How the level differs from the Castle
The structure is identical — five stages, branching exits, one correct way forward — but the Garden branches wider and earlier, so early runs tend to end quickly. In exchange, its rooms are more numerous and more varied, which means the collection fills faster.
Because the level is outdoors, orientation becomes a genuine tease: paths appear to lead somewhere obvious and do not. Several rooms deliberately look like exits and are not.
Reaching 100%
As in every level, full completion means discovering every room and recovering all three objects, and it unlocks the Garden's own bonus artwork with the creator standing in the grounds among the objects you found.
The Garden is the level most players complete first, because its rooms are easy to accumulate even during unsuccessful runs.
The three objects of the Garden
A wristwatch
Stopped, scratched, still buckled. The first object that clearly belongs to a modern life rather than to this place — and therefore the first real anomaly in the story.
A pair of shoes
Worn walking shoes, muddy, well used. Whoever you were, you walked a great deal.
A keepsake from the grounds
A small object recovered among the hedges, tying the estate to the person you are slowly reconstructing.