In the Empire, everyone prospers: you just have to obey, in exchange for safety. Everyone, within the borders of the Empire, may sleep well at night, for the terrors of the dark forces of Chaos are just a memory of the past. The Empire is powerful and the Emperor rules the land with supreme wisdom and an iron fist. The horror of The Space Between is that they never touched in the first place.FEAR the DARK an HeroQuest fanzine and a tribute In one of the game's discomfiting vignettes, Martin visits Daniel's grave as he is cremated. The whole creation is suffused with the dread and pain of a body you don't understand, and a hand you can't touch.
Everything in this game is distant and uncomfortable. The rest of the game is spent moving through environments Frey has created with distorted PlayStation 1–style art, which gives the whole thing a feeling of moving through a fuzzy VHS surveillance tape. It tries the player's patience, creates a constant sense of unease. But all the dialog is doled out as incredibly slow-moving text, with no real indication of who is talking. Much of it is taken up with elliptical, heavily thematic dialog about walls, and boundaries, bodies and performances. I'm writing about The Space Between indirectly because it's an indirect game. Fearing intimacy is almost always about fearing loss. The Space Between's Martin is afraid of intimacy, which is a lot like being terrified of death. If I concentrate, I can feel that terror coming back. I'd curl up in her arms and ask her what came after death, and why we had to die, and she'd have no answer. I would run to my mom, but she'd have no idea how to comfort me. I would imagine death and becoming nothing, and I would feel this creeping terror take hold of me. I used to get into spirals when I was a kid, usually when trying to go to sleep. So far as the game's code is concerned, he doesn't have a body at all.īeing terrified of one's body really means being terrified of death. In the scene, though you play as Martin, you never see his arm or his hand. It's this odd, disembodied sort of intimacy-touching without touching. He reaches out to touch the blanket and urges Daniel, who is outside the fort, to do the same thing. In an early scene, repeated often in the game as a sort of motif, Martin and his friend Daniel play as children. The game, a short horror title by Christoph Frey that was recently nominated for the prestigious Nuovo Award at the Independent Games Festival, is rife with unease about the bodies Martin builds, and the one he lives inside of. He imagines his buildings as bodies he can live inside of. In The Space Between, Martin, the player character, is an architect.
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