“The Space Between” by Christoph Frey.
“The architect Martin Melanson, commissioned to build a theater, meets a woman named Clara, outside of his apartment complex at night. Attracted to each other, they visit the theater’s building site. While they explore the unfinished stage, surrounded by scaffolds and lost in thoughts, reality slowly fades, where the curtain opens and a dark play about closeness and separation begins.”
Since a year my partner and I developed a little ritual: On each work day, I stand up fifteen minutes earlier than she does, go straight into the kitchen and make her a cup of tea. When the beverage is freshly brewed, I set it aside on her bedstand. Softly I start to wake her up by stroking her back and her arms through the blanket. I thought a lot about these moments after playing “The Space Between” and I enjoy them a lot more now.
“The Space Between” is a pretty short game with a playtime of roundabout one hour. Here you will play as an architect named Martin, moving him around in environments that look like they come straight from the glorious oldschool PlayStation era. Progress does not come from the movement alone, though, as the conversations and scenes want to be discovered too. All this in combination with the excellently written dialogues and audiovisual presentation invoke a “Twin Peaks”-like atmosphere. One of the sentences is very important and gets repeated several times:
“Sometimes walls don’t have to be out of matter.”
The three mysterious acts of “The Space Between” give you different possibilities to interpret this sentence. I told you at the start that I started to cherish the morning ritual with my significant other even more. This is because I felt a new kind of presence and connection between the two of us. The blanket is no wall whatsoever anymore, no border between us, but instead a multiplicator of our closeness on another level. [PLAY]
