This game was reviewed using Version 1.0.33.0. Your experience on other versions may vary.
Short Answer: A beautiful story-driven game that's just a few small missteps short of being an undisputable masterpiece. The gameplay can be a drag at times and the early chapters are a bit too slow-paced (partly due to said gameplay), but stick with it and you'll find a deep, emotional experience that's sure to leave a lasting impression.
Long Answer: Normally when I write a review about a game, I like to start with a brief synopsis of the story; but I think A Space for the Unbound is one of those games where the less you know going into it, the better. I'd even go so far as to say that the store page gives a little too much away, to say nothing about the trigger warnings in the opening that led me to predict a major plot point a full chapter before it happened. To attempt to explain the story with as little detail as possible, it follows two high school sweethearts, Atma and Raya, who find themselves struggling with their plans for the future and decide to create a bucket list of things they'd like to do together. What starts with such monumental goals as "watch a movie together" and "eat an entire cake" quickly becomes a supernatural journey of self-discovery, diving deep into the psyche of these two characters to uncover secrets that will change the course of their lives forever. I know that's not a very helpful summary, but like I said: the less you know, the better.
When it comes to presentation, it does a fantastic job across the board. The story takes place in the late 1990s, in a small rural town somewhere around Surabaya, Indonesia; and to make it feel as authentic as possible, it's filled to the brim with cultural references and even recreations of regional landmarks. The town you explore is one of those tight-knit communities where everyone knows everyone, and over time you'll learn more about the residents and help many of them overcome their insecurities just like Atma and Raya. The pixel art used for the environments is incredibly detailed to make each location feel that much more alive, almost like the town itself could be a character of its own; and it's punctuated by a beautiful soundtrack that gives an almost ethereal quality to it all.
In contrast, I'd say the gameplay is the weakest part of the whole experience—not outright bad, but more noticeably flawed. While it does sprinkle in mechanics like stealth segments or QTE combat, most of your playtime is dedicated to increasingly complex fetch quests in a semi-open map almost like a classic point-and-click adventure game, which feels like a fitting choice given the late 90s setting. You'll typically be given an overarching objective (e.g. find the ingredients to make a cake), and each individual task will, for one reason or another, cascade into a multi-step fetch quest of its own. While I wouldn't call these quests hard, they can be tedious by demanding a lot of running around and a lot of backtracking, sometimes for contrived reasons that at times can feel like unneeded filler. I've seen it argued that the gameplay isn't really the point, but it's a barrier standing between you and the story nonetheless, and I can't blame the players that were put off of finishing the game as a result—especially because I was almost one of them.
Something I wouldn't normally bother to mention for this kind of game is the achievements, but I should note while I'm still on the topic of gameplay that there's a little bit of story content locked behind the completion of Atma and Raya's bucket list. Some of that list includes collectibles or other interactions that can be missed entirely if you don't find them before moving to the next chapter, and the only way to go back and get them is to either restart the whole game or take advantage of multiple save files. It does not-so-subtly tell you each time you're about to hit a point of no return, so take advantage of that and don't be afraid to pull up a spoiler-free guide if you're afraid that you're missing something.
While the story is absolutely the game's greatest strength, the early hours have a bit of a pacing problem, at least in my opinion. The prologue and Chapter 1 (of 6) made a good first impression, setting up the supernatural mystery that drives the rest of the story in just a little over an hour. Chapters 2 and 3, by comparison, moved at a frustratingly slow pace, spending a combined 3+ hours dropping crumbs of information in-between lengthy gameplay segments that just raised more questions without answering the ones I already had. It was around this time that I considered dropping the game entirely because completing drawn-out fetch quests for little to no payoff was starting to test my patience—but I kept going, and I'm very glad that I stuck with it.
Chapter 4 onward is where the game puts its best foot forward. The story quickly picks up in pace, and it stops dangling question after question over your head to finally start giving you the pieces needed to put the proverbial puzzle together; all while showcasing some of the best visuals and music the game has to offer. You're introduced to a new gameplay mechanic that adds another layer of sorts to the maps you explore; and despite the fact that this can lead to even more convoluted puzzles, the payoff is so much better and faster than earlier chapters that it doesn't feel as annoying to work through as before. The supernatural elements are expanded in both the gameplay and the narrative; but as the world around our two main characters gets more and more fantastical, their deepest traumas are laid bare with an almost uncomfortable realism, exploring the subjects that lie at the core of the story in a much more grounded and mature way than I anticipated. It balances an overwhelming sense of despair with a message of hope, culminating into a story of triumph over adversity that left me with a feeling that I don't know how to properly articulate—all I can say is that I'm glad I got to experience it.
In the end, it struck a certain chord with me that I wasn't expecting; and for all my gripes about the pacing and the tedious gameplay during my 8-hour playthrough, the only thought that ran through my head as the credits rolled was "it was worth it." A Space for the Unbound is not a perfect game, but have patience with its flaws and you'll be rewarded with something beautiful that's bound to stick with you for a long, long time.
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