A Space for the Unbound

This game tells a fantastic story, poetic and touching. The main characters have depth and real substance but it's not just them, every person that the narrative decides to bring into focus, even in passing, has its own dignity and a little something to leave with you. The setting is colourful, vibrant and complemented by an absolutely delightful art style. The soundtrack is a thoughtful companion that knows when to be a gentle and unobtrusive frame and when to take centre place to drive home a scene's punchline, which it does with flying colours. Petting as many cats as you can is a plot point and game mechanic. Unfortunately that's also kind of the only good game mechanic... The main mechanic is point-and-click-style puzzles but, except for maybe one or two, they're trivially easy. Most of the time they amount to little more than short fetch quests and when they don't it's more often than not that the game pretty much tells you what you need to do anyways. This is a very accessible solution but it also took away any sense of accomplishment for me. Then there are minigames and those are fine, although they're very simple and they did get a bit repetitive for me. There is a sort of boss fight at the end where they get a bit of spice. Overall it largely feels like busywork that doesn't really add much to the experience. In fact, as time went on and I got more and more engrossed in the story, I found myself groaning out loud whenever the story had to stop at the next arbitrary obstacle. It's good that the game is interactive; that you get to move around and talk to people and actively help them. But I don't think it's executed terribly well, unfortunately. Maybe this could have been better served as a visual novel. But that would have likely doomed it to obscurity, which it definitely doesn't deserve. Play the game. The jank is worth it.

Game is really profound and has a lot of psychological symbolism which was used in an appropriate way. The story is really deep and may give you mixed feelings. Music also is empathetic to the scenes and story. It has an adventure / point and click feel almost reminds me of a visual novel. Loved it,

I delayed playing this one for a bit due to being disappointed with When The Past Was Around but this one I really enjoyed. It is very much a story focused game and that story is in my opinion the best of any game I've played (and I've played a bunch). Abuse is a major aspect of the story as you can start to see in the demo so make sure you are ready for that before starting. It took me 12-13 hours I think, stopping to pet all the cats several times. It has a really nice variable pixel size art style where the foreground has larger pixels than the background (cut scenes seem to have even larger pixel sizes), giving a retro feel and nice art. I was not entirely thrilled with the music the few times it was front and center but it wasn't bad and I still thought it did a great job setting the mood when in the background. The main gameplay aspect, besides finding things (that aren't hard to find), is a couple of forms of quicktime event. Unfortunately for people who have trouble with those there are no assist options available, although you can always try again and only the arcade has a long sequence that you need to do in one go with only a few misses allowed (it is optional; there is a brief cut scene at the end that you don't get if you don't complete everything but you can tell what the content would be without seeing it). There are also simple stealth parts. My main complaint is that while the game will warn you when the story will advance such that you can't go back and do everything it does not tell you if you have already done everything you can do up to that point. Also movement is fairly slow even running (and there is no auto-run but you will almost certainly want to run almost all the time). I did not encounter any bugs.

The story is great, emotional, unexpected, unconventional and well explained but at times I almost drop the game cause of the gameplay. Dont get me wrong, the game is fun sometimes but it gets really annoying in other moments. Repetitive tasks, go from A to B to A again to B again. But some puzzles are interesting and fun, the combat is not bad and the story makes everything worth it at the end. If you can handle the repetitive gameplay at some points I recommend you to play this because the story may make you cry, I almost did :)