The Gardener

What it is

The Gardener is a short visual novel you open in the browser. The itch.io page credits it to Petallix Games and lists the author as jmecom. The Gardener is marked Released, on HTML5, in the Visual Novel genre, and made with Godot. The only story line published with the listing is that The Gardener is about trans grief and a monster.

That is the whole plot the public pages give you. The Gardener does not come with a character list, a chapter count, or a description of the ending. The tags on the itch.io page are grief, Horror, LGBT, Short, and Story Rich. Those tags are the creator's own labels, not a review written here. Short and Story Rich together say the piece is meant to be read in one sitting and that the writing is the point of the visit.

How you read it

The horror tag sits next to the grief tag in the creator's labeling. The Gardener is not described as a combat game, a puzzle, or a score chase. There is no mention of an inventory, a map, or a fail state. The monster is named only as a monster. Treat that as the boundary of what is known. Anything more specific about the creature would be a guess, so it is left out.

A short reading session

A session is a reading session. Start it, read the lines you are given, and expect a short piece because the creator tagged it Short. Headphones are not requested. There is no separate warning text on the itch.io page beyond the tags, so the content note you can pass along is the one in the title area and the tags: grief, a monster, and an LGBT story. People who do not want that subject can skip it without missing a ruleset, because the activity is the reading.