The Space Between by Christoph Frey
Year: 2019
Platforms: Steam, Itch
Usual price: £4.79, or £6.00 on itch with soundtrack
Saves: Unnecessary, suggested playthrough in single on-hour session
Where do you go when you want to be by yourself? What places would you construct to escape to?
It’s always good to fire up something from the backlog having forgotten why you had it in the first place, only to be intrigued and impressed by what follows. The Space Between, from solo-dev Christoph Frey, does exactly that – by way of introduction, some of it’s key tags on Steam are Experimental, Emotional, Horror, Visual Novel, and Mystery.
That “Horror” and “Dark” are in there gives a false impression – the darkness you encounter comes only partially from the lack of light and the vignetting enclosing the scenes. By the end of the hour’s playthrough, it becomes clear that shadows and (what I can only call) “crypted spaces” are an everyday part of life – perhaps a definition of existence itself. Things only get ominous when we acknowledge them, make them real.
TSB combines a lo-fi PS1-era tech style with a surrealist, brutalist environment, all held together with a narrative and style that ensures it lingers in the mind. Everything is woven together at just the right pace, each corner of the world mirroring and symbolising a corner of the plot’s own explorations. It can be easier to think of it as a tiny museum of the self, where half-finished megastructures reflect our own half-baked dreams, but where reality breaks through in obscured secrets.
As Frey notes in an interview with Game Developer:
“the ghost story turned into a surreal examination of the magnetic relation between closeness and distance to oneself and other humans, between life and death”
It won’t be for everyone, but if you like meandering through abstract, unnerving structures which seem to have a soul of their own, then The Space Between is easily worth an hour of time. Similarly, if you want to see how narratives can be done well in computer game worlds, this is definitely one to experience.
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