These scenarios didn't often stump us in fact, helpful characters – like talking cats – hold your hand a little too much, giving you obvious hints as to where you need to go, boiling a chunk of the game down to walking from point A to point B and back again.Ī lot of this feels padded out. You might, for example, have to find the ingredients to bake a cake or a rope to throw over the school’s wall to climb out and skip class. You spend most of your time looking for specific items around town to give to the right people or make an event happen.

And give them names, too.Ī Space For The Unbound's general loop is familiar adventure game fare. If you like cute pixel cats, you can pet them all. A chill soundtrack that we can’t wait to add to a low-fi beats playlist makes for a perfect accompaniment to all the highs and lows.Īlso cats. Quirky characters abound to lighten the mood when the game delves into heavier topics, and as each chapter concludes, the story becomes more wildly fantastical.

The characters quickly endeared themselves to us, and the mystery of Raya’s powers, of strange dreams and stranger occurrences around town, kept us hooked from prologue to heartwarming epilogue, despite some confusing dialogue errors in English, never veering too deeply into the melancholic. We won’t spoil any more of the story because, as is typical of most adventure games, it’s the main reason to play. A chef that can’t decide which culinary art to pursue, a forgetful old man that can’t remember a fond memory of his deceased brother, a young child with an unhealthy chocolate obsession – the list goes on, with Atma helping them each in turn in order to advance an overarching plot that touches on abuse, bullying, loss, and more.Ĭaptured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked) You see, said notebook allows Atma to hop into people’s minds to alleviate their mental anguish. It isn’t long before Raya reveals her supernatural powers to you, and it's these powers, along with a mysterious notebook that Atma finds, that lead to quite a lot of problems for you to solve. Much like reading a good book, it felt right to play this slice-of-life adventure game this way it pulled us in immediately in with its gorgeous pixel art depicting 1990s Indonesia and entranced us with its narrative of anxiety, depression, and hefty dose of magic realism.Ī Space For The Unbound puts you in the role of a high school student named Atma, spending much of his time with his girlfriend Raya as they explore their vividly realised town of Loka. We began our time with Mojiken Studio’s A Space For The Unbound curled up on our sofa, cup of steaming tea close by, with winter rain softly rapping against the window.

Space for the unbound