A Space For The Unbound Took Me On An Emotional And Nostalgic Anime Pilgrimage

Since late 2021, I’ve been tinkering away at a little column here on IGN.com highlighting indie games I thought were neat. It’s been running quietly away on Saturday afternoons, throwing spotlights on little games and developers that weren’t otherwise getting a lot of attention from mainstream gaming sites like ours.

I’m proud of that coverage up to today, but today I’m extra proud, because my quiet year-plus efforts are about to get much, much louder. My little column today joins a much larger IGN initiative To bring all types of editorial columns into the spotlight. So I can now take a moment and talk about my part in this initiative.

It’s always difficult to know the answer to a question about indie game coverage, especially on sites such as this one. With a large audience that rightfully expects us to cover all the biggest beats across games and entertainment every day, combined with the massive size of both industries, it’s inevitable that the vast majority of our resources go toward writing about things people already know they’re interested in. I’m talking about the Marvels, the big PlayStation exclusives, the prestige TV shows, the Marios. These are the things that our audience craves to read. We also love to write about them.

My goal is to shine a light on the amazing games that live in the space between the Marvels and Marios.

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And yet, the unfortunate inevitability of this is that it often leaves out the truly massive body of work being done by smaller, lesser-known or even unknown creators who don’t have the IP, the budget, the thousand-person studios, or the names to already be known by a mainstream audience. Sometimes an indie surprise does reach the mainstream, but these occasions are rare. Every day is filled with innovative, creative, funny, bizarre, clever, and amazing games that you won’t hear about. Many of these games are breaking new ground in game design, art and music. AAA is afraid of missing sales targets. Some of them are filling the gaps in genres that mainstream games have forgotten completely. Others are created by developers who have overcome great obstacles in pursuit of their dreams of creating video games.

They are worthy of being known, not just as a part of a show or tweet, but with joyous, curious depths and attention. IGN can play an important role in helping to bring them out.

So this is Hidden Treasures, a column where every month I’ll introduce you to a small game made by a small team that isn’t otherwise being covered extensively on IGN. I’ll use this space to tell you about my early impressions of it (at least the first few hours, if not more) and chat with its developers about who they are, what they’re making, why they’re making it, and why you should care. My goal isn’t to surface to you only 10/10 perfect indie gems, or the next Stardew Valley. It’s to shed a little light on the brilliant games inhabiting the spaces between the Marios and the Marvels, and celebrate the corners of this creative industry that don’t always get time in the sun.

I hope you’ll end up inspired by this column to at least check a few of them out, or if not, to go hunt for some hidden treasures of your own.

(You can also catch up on previous Hidden Treasures columns, including the ones before this column even had a name.)

With that out of the way, I’d like to formally kick things off by telling you that I spent at least an hour last night ugly crying my way through the end of A Space for the Unbound – a gorgeous pixel art slice-of-life game that’s consumed my evenings for the last several days.

A Space for the Unbound follows a young man named Atma, who’s on the cusp of adulthood in late ’90s rural Indonesia. Atma and Raya are engaged in a story that exudes huge Your Name and Weathering with You vibes. Together, they balance big discussions about their future and the completion of a wholesome list. Raya has some kind of matter manipulation thing going on, and Atma can “spacedive” into the hearts of people he meets and help them resolve their internal dilemmas.

Part of the way A Space for the Unbound lets its mystery pleasantly simmer in the backdrop is through its cheerful portrayal of ’90s Indonesia and Atma’s role in it as a young man. Between adventures with Raya, he’s exploring the town: collecting bottle caps, naming and petting every cat he sees, playing games at the arcade, helping local townspeople with their problems, or fending off school bullies. Between major story beats, the various vignettes offer a loveable glimpse into Indonesia in 1990s and the everyday problems of ordinary people. I was a novice in this area and loved the combination of familiar culture with unfamiliar humanity.

A Space for the Unbound is clearly a very personal glimpse into a setting and time period close to game director Dimas Novan D.’s heart. He tells me in an email interview that his idea for the game came from the concept of Seichijunrei, or an “anime pilgrimage,” where you compare real-life locations with an anime counterpart. This idea allowed Dimas to realize that many of the anime he knew had references to real-life places, from landmarks and buildings to common rural areas. He wanted to do it again, but this time for places he had lived in over a period of time that was meaningful to him and his development team.

Dimas began working on the game with a small team from Surabaya-based Mojiken Studio in 2015. Mojiken was also creating and releasing other games for a large portion of that time. But around 2020, with When the Past Was Around released, the studio was able to dedicate everyone at the studio (around 12-14 people) to Dimas’ project. But Dimas admits the first few years were “probably the hardest” for him personally.

“I [had] to juggle between work and trying to find ASFTU’s game direction,” he recalls. “The very basic concept of the story has already been finished since the ASFTU prototype in 2015, but making it a more substantial experience in a video game format was a heavy task. Being relatively new to the game development industry, it was hard for me decide the right mechanic for the entire game. It must have entertainment and interactivity to allow the player to enjoy the game and fully immerse themselves.

“Plus the core message of the game is something that can not be said right after the very first part of the game. To make sure people understand our message, we have to make it entertaining and engaging. Some elements worked, others didn’t. We tried several prototypes. But in 2019, we were really glad that we finally found the right formula for the game, and in 2020, the demo was released to very positive reception.”

Dimas also wanted to capture a time and place that was close to his heart. He hopes those who play A Space for the Unbound will feel the passage time in Loka Town. He tells me he was also inspired by another Japanese concept: Mono no aware, or “the pathos of things.” He describes it as an appreciation for or awareness of impermanence and the passage of time.

For us, the most important thing is that we feel at home as Indonesians. It makes it feel like our childhood.

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“We picked that theme because we grow older and want to reminisce about the past, those happy times, those difficult times, those growing up times,” Dimas says. “Every generation has its own memories and ASFTU is our memories and we want to preserve that before we completely forget about it. The most important thing for us is that it makes us feel at home as Indonesians, making it feel like our own growing-up time.”

While A Space for the Unbound is certainly about all these things – nostalgia, growing up, being aware of the passage of time as two young people enter a new chapter of their lives – there’s something Other going on here that I don’t want to spoil, but that I want to urge you to play and uncover. The good news here is that you don’t have to play A Space for the Unbound long to be hooked on doing that detective work. Very early on, A Space for the Unbound has an overpowering sense of underlying mystery, even when you’re not exactly sure what the mystery is. Part of that comes from the prologue – a dream-like sequence featuring a young girl named Nirmala who’s friends with Atma but doesn’t seem to exist anywhere in his day-to-day life. Or maybe it’s the strange relationship Atma seems to have with everyone in town – he has memories of a favorite food stall, for instance, but not of another young woman in his class. I was so hungry by the end of chapter 2, that I wanted to play more to try and figure it out. What the hell was going on? This was because there was no clear theory.

So no, I’m not going to spoil Why I was blubbering into multiple handkerchiefs by A Space for the Unbound’s beautiful (emotionally and aesthetically) conclusion, but I desperately need to recommend the game as one of the fastest turnarounds from “Oh hey this looks neat” to “I MUST KEEP PLAYING THIS” I’ve ever experienced. If you’re at all keen on anime romances like Your Name, slice-of-life tales that take you to new places, emotional explorations of trauma or identity, or petting cats, give it a shot.

Rebekah Valentine works as a news reporter at IGN. You can find her on twitter @duckvalentine.