Plenty of indie games deal with anxiety and depression, but few contain such raw and mighty anguish as A Space for the Unbound. Following a group of teenagers through the difficulties of school life and beyond – beyond in space as much as time – it’s appropriately awkward at times, rushing over-eagerly in some areas, dawdling for far too long in others and frequently figuring it out as it goes. With that teenage earnestness comes buckets of charm though and, more importantly, a genuine, raw sincerity. A Space for the Unbound feels a lot, and it feels hard, and it’s intoxicating as a result.
After a big and frankly traumatic prologue, which concludes with one of the most memorably upsetting first-person sequences I’ve experienced, A Space for the Unbound settles in as a kind of slice-of-life narrative adventure following Atma, a teenage boy at school in 90s Indonesia. Its setting is a blessing. The rural town you jog around is both quaint and otherworldly, a handful of connected roads featuring the nostalgic everyday – food carts, convenience stalls, a couple of strolling locals – but standing up isolated against the bubblegum pixel-art skyboxes like old Western movie sets, two-dimensional and out of time.
To many players the familiar waypoints of adolescence – first dates, school reports, Game Boys, parents – will anchor you in a place so specific that it likely feels refreshingly unfamiliar. For Indonesian players specifically there seem to be references aplenty – to traditional music, comfort food, historic festivals – while its more explicitly paranormal elements, of which there are plenty, do the work in unbinding. This is really the heart of it in A Space for the Unbound: familiarity and unreality mixing together, throwing you off, bamboozling you into dropping guard. The way developer Mojiken has managed that across cultures is quite something, making something so specific to one place and time feel so universal, with such panache.
