It's The Best Time Of Year For This Cozy, Slow Burn Game - Kotaku

It’s a sweet, undemanding adventure game with a layered story to get lost in; it’s a grapefruit slice to enjoy while more high-profile studios start the year with class clownproblems and performance issues.

But as dreamlike as A Space for the Unbound can get—its core story follows teenagers Atma and his inscrutable girlfriend Raya, who can manipulate reality at the cost of her health—its release was subject to real life, too.

It’s set in a small, warm town, with, on its surface, not much happening other than the protagonists’ school life, a low-traffic internet cafe, and clusters of bitter melon growing off of short white fences.

Though collectable bottle caps from apparently popular Indonesian drinks like Rhino Soda(“How can something locally produced be so expensive?” Atma asks) glint on the ground, and there are a few instances of uncharacteristically didactic anti-smoking dialogue, supposedly to speak to Indonesia’s ongoing tobacco addiction(“Smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, and can complicate pregnancy,” a general store owner dutifully informs us and Atma), the game never tries to explain its culture to you.

As Atma, you’ll find useful junk, which a shopkeeper complains of people piling up, in an abandoned patch of swampland to help you complete objectives like baking a black forest cake for Raya.

I played through a bit more than half of it, and never felt totally sure of its emotions or the message it was trying to send with them, though the game’s Steam description calls it “a story about overcoming anxiety, depression.”