The first thing you notice is the quiet. There is no tutorial, no quest log, no minimap. Just a character standing in a field of tall, softly swaying grass under a vast sky.
The world feels alive, waiting for you to move. This is the signature of a Chris Bell game, a feeling of serene discovery that defined Journey and Sky: Children of the Light.
Now, at Gardens Interactive, the goal is to build that feeling again, but with the connective tissue of a persistent, shared world. The studio is not just making another game. It is attempting to construct a new kind of social space, one woven from the same emotional fabric as its founders' past hits, but designed from the ground up for multiplayer friendship and adventure [Gardens.dev].
A Studio Built on Emotional Craft
Gardens Interactive is a distributed game studio founded in 2020, but its creative lineage stretches back over a decade. Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Chris Bell was a lead designer on Journey, the landmark 2012 title that redefined wordless, emotional storytelling in games. He later contributed to What Remains of Edith Finch and was a creative director on Sky: Children of the Light [Gardens.dev]. His brother, Stephen Bell, serves as CEO and Narrative Director, while Lexie Dostal rounds out the founding trio.
This is a team that understands how to build worlds players want to inhabit, not just conquer. Their flagship project, currently under the working title Project Gardens, is described as a shared 3D fantasy survival adventure set in a shapeshifting wilderness, built on Unreal Engine 5 [Gardens.dev]. The studio has assembled an art team with veterans from major titles, and an advisory board that includes former Sony Computer Entertainment America CEO Jack Tretton, former Microsoft chairman John W. Thompson, and former Tencent president Ben Feder [Gamedeveloper.com, 2026]; [Lsvp.com, 2026].
The Multiplayer Wedge
For all the talk of lush worlds and social roleplay, Gardens Interactive's concrete bet is on multiplayer technology as its wedge. The studio has partnered with Pragma, a backend engine specialist, to handle the complex social features required for its persistent world [Pragma.gg, 2023]; [Businesswire, 2024].
By outsourcing this core infrastructure, Gardens can focus its medium-sized team (estimated at 51-100 employees) on what they do best: art, design, and crafting the player experience [Prospeo.io, 2025]. In a 2025 year-in-review post, the team highlighted an overhauled website, the launch of a press kit and blog, and the conduct of early external multiplayer playtests [Gardens.dev, Dec 2025].
The Funding Enigma and Runway Questions
The most opaque part of the Gardens story is its financing. No funding rounds, amounts, or lead investors are publicly disclosed. Secondary data services estimate annual revenue around $1.1 million and a valuation of $3.6 million based on industry averages [Prospeo.io, 2025]. The studio lists prestigious backers like Lightspeed Venture Partners and Krafton, alongside individual angels, but without details on check sizes or timelines [Gardens.dev].
This creates the studio's central tension. Building a high-fidelity, persistent online world is a capital-intensive endeavor. The risks are not creative, but operational:
- The burn rate mystery. With a team of its reported size and the technical demands of an Unreal Engine 5 project, the monthly burn is likely significant.
- The market's patience. The games industry is littered with beautiful, ambitious projects that ran out of time and money.
- The scope challenge. "Social roleplay and adventure" in a "shapeshifting wilderness" is a compelling vision, but also a dangerously broad one.
What Success Looks Like in 2025
For a studio still in early development, the milestones are clear and binary. The next twelve months will be about moving from a promising prototype to a demonstrable product.
| Role | Name | Key Background |
|---|---|---|
| Co-founder, CCO, Creative Director, Chairman | Chris Bell | Lead designer on Journey; creative director on Sky [Gardens.dev] |
| Co-founder, CEO, Narrative Director | Stephen Bell | Narrative lead for Gardens Interactive [Crunchbase, 2026] |
| Co-founder | Lexie Dostal | Co-founder of Gardens Interactive [Pragma.gg, 2023] |
| Art Director | Andrew Porter | Art Director for Gardens Interactive [LinkedIn, 2026] |
| Operations Director | Jane Ng | Operations Director for Gardens Interactive [LinkedIn, 2026] |
Every product answers a cultural question. Gardens Interactive is implicitly asking a different one: what if a game's primary purpose was not to win or build, but simply to be together in a place of beauty? It is a question born from the quiet fields of Journey, now waiting for friends to arrive.