![]() Plenty of indie games deal with anxiety and depression, but few contain such raw and mighty anguish as A Space for the Unbound. Regardless, this is a rich yarn with a fantastic ending, so find some space for it if you can.Disparate parts pull together to form a beautiful game that's only more potent for its awkward adolescence. A Space For the Unbound deeply wants to be in the same category, but its earliest moments are too wayward, too slow to generate momentum. What this amounts to is a superb story that occasionally dips into the sublime, but doesn’t manage to clasp its fingers around your heart like To The Moon, Gone Home and other similar narrative adventures. ![]() We were more engrossed with the collect-’em-all bottle caps that litter the environment. They do the basic job of breaking up the rhythm – you’d be talking and running between locations without them – but they’re certainly not inspiring. Then there are quizzes, some shape sorting and even basic algebra. Basically, it’s a Street Fighter combos against the clock. Combat becomes a rush to press a sequence of buttons within a timeframe. It can get ridiculously obvious at times, and there were precious few moments where we had woken up and used our brains to figure out a puzzle.Īs if in acknowledgment of this, A Space For the Unbound adds in some minigames for basic actions that you might pull off. Often, the only things you can do are slot item A in lock B. Characters hint at the answer when you’d already figured it out. A Space For the Unbound really, desperately wants you to reach its final third, so it does everything in its power to get you there. There are very few situations where you use items on locations, and even fewer where you use items on other items. Every interactable element is telegraphed with an icon, so there’s almost no chance of missing the chance to press A and tinker with it. It’s a stripped back point-and-click adventure, locking you to a single two-dimensional plane. In gameplay terms, A Space For the Unbound is relatively simplistic. The story pays off and then some, delivering an emotional time-bomb that will send your empathies and plot-understanding careening into wildly different directions. ![]() Should you find your interest waning after hours four or five, stick around. Like the culmination of a Final Fantasy game, A Space For the Unbound goes off the existential rails, and we were here for it. For all the meandering and oxbow lakes of the first and second act, the third act is a torrent. By the end, we looked back and realised we hadn’t spent much time with Raya at all.Īgain, an asterisk here, as the last act is a doozy. At the start, it’s domestic and endearing, but after a few hours of chasing cats and ducks, or helping businesses succeed, you kind of want it to get to the point. The story in A Space For the Unbound meanders like a river, veering away from the narrative you care about (Atma and Raya), and towards other inconsequential plotlines and characters. Again, that’s another pitfall dodged: everybody sounds different and authentic, rather than sounding like they tumbled from the same writer’s pen. We found ourselves chatting to everyone, as the cast of characters are a bunch of real oddballs. The dialogue and story are expertly written too, managing to dodge the pitfall of writing for teens and sounding believable. ![]() ![]() The disappointment is that you’d miss out on a sensitively crafted and imaginative tale. There are mental health trigger warnings at the start of the game for a reason: if you have sensitivities to bullying, abuse and suicide, you might want to take your time or give this a miss. Raya’s mental health frays, and there’s only so much you can do to reassure her or hold her back. As you would expect, it doesn’t last, as Raya begins to buckle under the pressure of her bullying, which in turn puts stress on the relationship. Atma and Raya both hold hands and spend time in each other’s company, all while hiding powers from each other. It’s a bit like a 16-bit game of Inception. It’s a kind of dreamscape where every whim is manifested, as you push impulses out of the subconscious and into the conscious mind, encouraging their owners to face them. And you wouldn’t want to be a hypocrite, as you have a power too: you were given a magical red book when you were younger, which allows you to ‘Spacedive’ – a term for being able to jump into people’s subconscious and interact directly with their hopes, fears and wants. ![]()
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