each game in this garden is a question the past asked the future. linger as long as you wish; the petals do not close while you read.
found in temperate longing-zones. blooms when the player accepts the present. loop length: 4 hours. soundtrack of small bells. a slow puzzle of light and patience.
step in →a hanging game. swings between two memories. found near forgotten libraries and unwound clocks. loop length: 0:42:00. tend to it nightly.
linger →first specimen pressed in winter. plays only between dusk and the first snowfall. a quiet text adventure where every sentence is a snowflake.
step in →a long, slow strategy of patience. one move per real day. blooms over 365 turns. some who tend to it never see its flower.
tend to →a creeping game. grows 1px per real second across the screen. when the moss reaches the corner, the chapter ends. there is no other goal.
linger →the largest flower in the herbarium. plays only while the screen brightness drops below 30%. a night-piece for slow rooms.
step in →a wordless game of breath and pause. inputs are softer than presses — a hover, a held breath, a release. soundtrack: the room you are in.
linger →a game shaped like forget-me-nots. asks one question per visit. saves nothing. the player is asked to remember on their own.
tend to →the rarest specimen. shown only when the page is going to sleep. plays itself, slowly, while you watch. the only purple-leaning flower in the herbarium.
linger →“ every game in this garden is a question the past asked the future. ” — field notes, vol. iii, page 47
it is best to enter the garden at the hour the herbarium was first opened — 04:17 a.m., the moment between night and the first thrush. at that hour, the specimens are still half-asleep, and the petals release their longest exhale.
the chronospecimens were first pressed by an anonymous archivist who signed every page with a small drawing of a forget-me-not. there are 142 pages in the original folio, of which 9 have been digitized as games. the remaining 133 are kept in a glass case in a room you cannot reach by walking.
each specimen has a cycle — the length of one full bloom. a short cycle, like 0000:08:00, is the breath of a small game. a long cycle, like 8760:00:00, is the breath of a year. you are not asked to finish the longer cycles. you are asked, only, to be present for as much of one as you can.
the herbarium does not save your progress. it is a garden, not a record. when you return tomorrow, the petals will not remember you, but the moss will, and the moss is enough.
if you find a specimen that does not appear in the index — a tenth flower, perhaps, glimpsed near the page-fold — please do not pick it. it is a rarest, and the herbarium prefers to keep its rarest specimens unrecorded.
the page is going to sleep.
step out softly, or stay until the moss reaches the corner.