Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Developer Mojiken Studio Publisher Toge Productions Origin Indonesia Release 2023
Eight years, it took. Eight years to make A Space For The Unbound, the homely, bizarre and sometimes deeply moving adventure game from Surabaya-based studio Mojiken. On the one hand, it’s a very personal tale, recapturing memories of growing up in 1990s Indonesia. On the other, it’s a pop-cultural grab bag, with influences picked from across the globe. You’ll find riffs on everything from Street Fighter II to Monkey Island and Phoenix Wright, and the films of Makoto Shinkai to Donnie Darko. Everything, it seems, got thrown into the pot as it bubbled away for all those years.
What’s particularly remarkable is how the developers of A Space For The Unbound managed to balance its stranger, more outlandish elements with a sensitive portrayal of mental-health problems. The game casts you as Atma, who spends the game helping his school friend Raya manage her increasingly loose grip on reality. For the most part, the story takes the form of a traditional adventure game, with Atma using objects to solve puzzles in a small Indonesian town, but along the way he gains the ability to ‘space dive’, warping inside people’s minds to help unlock their thoughts. Even if you haven’t played it, that description alone might make it easy to understand why this game – with its intricate narrative and its smörgåsbord of mechanics – took so long to make.
Before Mojiken had mostly been producing Flash“And then we were thinking, ‘If we want to strike out as a game developer, then we should make a game by ourselves’,” he recalls. In fact, they would make several. The initial idea was that each person in the studio should make their own game, and by turning it into a finished product, they would learn about not only the technical aspects of creating a game, but also the business and marketing side of things.
