A Space for the Unbound review - "A poignant, tedious, yet satisfying celebration of the shades of grey within us all"

I'm often very easily swayed by emotional undertones, especially when it comes to narrative adventures on mobile. I've played my fair share of them, so I'd like to think I already have a sense of how things will turn out from the get-go - but A Space for the Unbound, for all its ups and downs, definitely threw me for a loop.

And that's not to say it was terribly confusing or frustrating - far from it, in fact. The game itself already gives you a bit of foreshadowing with the hilarious movie the two main protagonists watch at the very beginning, where what's supposedly a romance winds up with the most random ending involving a Cat Man and his cat wonderland. 

But where this time-travelling, Inception-diving, heartbreaking adventure instead takes you is to a place of healing and acceptance towards the end, where nothing has changed but everything has changed - and that, it turns out, is what matters most.

A slice-of-life YA tale by day

On the surface, A Space for the Unbound offers a typical Young Adult story centred around two teens on the last few days of high school. It has all the elements of your average YA romance - the small-town vibes, the clichéd bucket list, and the poignant last-day-of-school energy. It even has that overarching coming-of-age theme of figuring out what to do after graduation and where to go from there.  And that alone would've already been perfect for me given how I'm a huge fan of the genre's template, even more so since this one is set in charming rural Indonesia.

But it doesn't take long before what's seemingly ordinary on an ordinary day twists into something less collect-bottle-caps-to-immortalise-our-youth and more the-end-is-nigh-so-we're-all-gonna-die - something that Mojiken Studio executes so perfectly thanks to the superb pixel-art animations and the excellent dialogue. 

And while the ending "twist" can be a tad predictable, that didn't take away from my enjoyment of the whole thing at all. This is all because the writers have masterfully perfected the art of storytelling here, landing every emotional beat and weaving in the elegantly timed lighthearted moments and humour at all the right moments. Characters are fully three-dimensional, with each NPC showing off their many, many shades of grey, so much so that they've all become incredibly memorable framing devices for the heart of the story. 

A supernatural conundrum (and tedium) by night

The ending is very much earned, satisfying, and left me in tears but with enough room to breathe as the emotions died down. The problem is that it takes a minimum of 10 hours to get there - more if you want to clear every single side-quest - and it can be a bit of a slog to reach the end. All the elements, events, and side characters do matter, yes - but for me, the needless back-and-forths doing fetch quests and the like could have been halved, and the story would've been all the better for it.

I suppose this is a case of the gameplay getting in the way of the story, as while I appreciate the fun puzzles you need to solve and the lack of any ridiculous inventory combinations here, things can get repetitive pretty quickly (such as a certain fighting game-esque mechanic that felt amusing at first). If the total runtime were cut in half, I feel like the ending still would've made the same impact, so it's a shame you have to endure a bunch of tedious tasks just to get there.

Take Sumire, for instance - I consider this the gold standard for telling an emotional tale, complementing it with fantastic gameplay, and never overstaying its welcome.

Much ado about pointing and clicking

My second gripe - and perhaps the more important one - is that it doesn't feel at all optimised for mobile, mainly because it's simply been ported with virtual buttons and not much else. I've always believed that there's no better platform for the humble point-and-click than on mobile, because the touchscreen literally lets you point and click (or tap). So I was sadly disappointed to find that I couldn't just tap to move/walk/interact here, and instead had to resort to a D-pad and an awkward A or B button on-screen. I suppose you could always just connect a controller if you wanted to, but that really defeats the purpose of playing a point-and-click adventure on your phone.

In relation to this, the Auto-Save function, while it does exist, doesn't literally auto-save just anywhere. It still uses certain scenes as invisible checkpoints, so there were times when I logged off and had to repeat entire sections of text and dialogue once I logged back in just to continue my playthrough. It's counterproductive to mobile's pick-up-and-play nature, and the main reason why I just can't give A Space for the Unbound full marks.

The spotless writing alone would've gotten a solid 10/10 for me, but for a review of a mobile port, I sadly have to knock it down a few notches for the optimisation alone. Still, if you're not fussed about controls - and you don't mind immersing yourself in this for a good 10 hours - then this adventure is truly unforgettable. 

And I'm not just saying that as someone who's easily triggered by tearjerkers - in fact, I tried so darn hard to keep the tears at bay to make sure I was as objective as possible (to no avail). But by the time the last hour and a half rolled around, the tears kept coming and wouldn't stop. I blame Masdito "Ittou" Bachtiar's musical mastery, who was also responsible for the soundtrack to When The Past Was Around - another point-and-click narrative I absolutely loved. 

At first, I thought the story felt very Your Name, then it turned into Weathering With You, and then it started shifting into this-is-no-longer-a-manic-pixie-dream-girl territory by the third hour or so. Fair warning - the narrative tackles issues of mental health and depression (albeit delicately), so triggers abound. But if you're a fan of Makoto Shinkai's brand of magic realism with a dash of the macabre, A Space for the Unbound is an instant recommendation.