The Slow Burn Arthouse Horror of The Space Between

[Music] so last time I talked briefly about how obfuscated visuals complained a horror through ambiguity and I think the creator of today's games Austrian indie game developer Christoph Frey knows this as well as anyone he seems to have an interest in abstract visuals and how that can impact a player's emotional state one of his oldest games 2012's protest is an all audio game where you walk through a 3d space in the middle of social unrest without anything rendered on the screen in order to generate tension five years later in 2017 he released disconnected a short horror title made for the asylum Game Jam the entire game loosely emulates badly encoded body cam footage a wide fov shaky camera movement in response to your inputs that sort of simulate a body heaving to and fro and tremendous amounts of artificial compression noise the result is a game where you really can't trust your eyes shadows bubble and dance lights Street columns across your vision and obscure what's behind them and even benign objects take on an ominous threatening Sensibility everything's grainy and distorted and just off it's just a fifteen-minute little ghost story and I won't ruin it here but it's nice and creepy and works in large part because of the tone set by the Lofa aesthetic after that there was horror Veck we and what's fascinating to me about this title is how much growth for a shows is a designer disconnected is good fun for a jam game but it's also a stock horror game a title about spooky ghastly things happening in dark corners horror vac wee is decidedly less interested in just ticking genre boxes in it you play as someone who is in a coma and drifts from memory to memory and depending on what memories you encounter it can change what the next memories you think of are you do this as a player by walking from mostly empty room to mostly empty room looking at whatever objects manifest together each of these objects seems to tell a loose story about your life they're not even vignettes so much as memory fragments that when combined to tell you an abstract idea of the player-character story as you can see it's yet another game that experiments with visual distortions it basically applies a noise filter to the scene and the closer things are to you the more white they appear but this doesn't just get used to generate fear or attention and previous games it's used to actively disorient you the game features these large open rooms and a plotting movement speed there are hallways that take upwards of 30 seconds to reach the end of and without any indication you're even moving due to the way the game renders its world on top of that rooms can change and shift you'll enter a dead-end room find the one object inside of it and turn around only to find yourself in a completely different room with different objects this gives rise to a sense of being utterly lost adrift in your mind with no real way out horror vac we is Latin for fear of empty space and it's clear why fray chose this as the title the horror of the void is this unmoored wandering in hopes of finding something to cling to the void is this space between coherent memories a blank and idle brain that can either escape into a dreamlike state nor fully awakened an empty but inescapable existence it's the terror of blankness of Sisyphean tasks of neither progress nor ends but in context for fray horror vac we is notable because it doesn't tell a straightforward narrative it presents a lot of thematic ambiguity and in some ways actively resists players attempting to play it with its slow pace and interests and thematics over engagement which brings us I think contextually up to today's game the space between it builds on a lot of what phrase done before distorted low-five visuals to establish tone and manipulate the player's emotional state a reluctance to give the player closure or answers and an interest in first-person storytelling but we're disconnected was just a little ghost story and horror vac we was an abstract largely non narrative experience what really sets the space between apart is that while it's still very open to interpretation and very abstract in some ways it absolutely tells a coherent narrative while establishing themes it doesn't just gesture at but attempts to actively explore in the text the space between opens with a slow crawl of a newspaper article martin Melanson the player character was found dead in the walls of a theater that he was the architect of the article states the police can't rule out murder although honestly I don't know how you accidentally end up buried in the walls of a building you're constructing and goes on to state that there are suspects in melanson's closed environment from there the game moves back to Martin's childhood he's in a blanket for it propped up by a sofa and two chairs off screen just outside of the fort his friend Daniel talks to him and immediately there's kind of two things to note here first you'll start to see one of the game's main decisions that really works in its favor overall but will also absolutely drive some players to quit in frustration the game has a hard focus on dialogue but not in the way video games typically do first it's extremely slow with doling it out like look how long the game holds on this single word yes and combined with the lack of a spoken audio colored text names preface in the dialogue or facial animations it can become difficult to know who's speaking other than picking up on context clues and it's not like fray doesn't know this remember disconnected was a game jam game made over weekend two years before this one that had a clearly marked dialogue this is an intentional choice and he's confirmed this on his hgo page to quote reminds Katherine Brinegar writing about the game quote fray leaves it up to the player to determine who is speaking at any given moment letting fears or questions linger between the characters blending them together are their reflections of one another or truly independent entities in some ways they do serve as fragments of one another their conversations open to interpretation by any reader end quote additionally control is usually rested away from the player during these dialogue sequences you can't even look around or tilt the camera or do other little fidgety things that a lot of other games let you do while the dialog plays out there is nothing to do but read these terse lines of dialogue and suss out their meaning in context even as you don't necessarily know who is speaking them the result is something utterly alien and off-putting and contrary to every design mantra out there about how you do this sort of thing but by doing these things the game hyper focuses on its dialogue demanding the player pay attention by making it hard to follow and giving the option to do nothing else the result is a game that feels the most like a 70 slow-burn horror drama I think I've ever played it's a game about characters and the way their damage impacts their choices to ultimately tragic and terrifying outcomes with the horror existing more in the ideas that are explored than some monster or ghost creeping in the shadows the game is closer to Carrie or The Changeling than alien or Halloween and as ponderous as the game can be there's something refreshing about that methodical plotting it builds at a glacial pace but it knows what it's building to which brings us back to the opening sequence in the blanket for it outside of the fort Daniel asks Martin if he's ready to come out yet Martin says no but that he still wishes Daniel to be there for him Daniel then asks Martin to put his hand up to the blanket and says he'll do the same on his end with both hands touching on either side of the blanket Daniel asks Martin do you feel my hand or the curtain Martin thinks about it and reply both I guess he can sense his friend but also that which separates him this is a formative scene for little Martin and when the game will return to multiple times after the blanket port scene we cut to a now adult Martin coming home to his apartment here he meets Clara a neighbor smoking a cigarette outside the two hit it off and wander into a nearby bench where Martin tells her that he's an architect - which Clara replies a builder of walls which is thematically on point and to which Martin responds sometimes walls don't have to be made out of matter which that's another thing that may or may not bug some people about this game the space between it has a strong thematic focus which you know me I love that but it can start approaching oops all allegory levels of symbolism it isn't subtle and it's constant which gives you plenty to work with when doing thematically constructions hi there but it also kind of makes the game feel clunky because you can hear the gears turning really loudly because every conversation between Daniel and Martin or Clara and Martin focuses on the themes of closeness and separation even as the text blends their voices together the relationships and dialogue feel more like vessels for themes then something woven naturally into the fabric of a narrative and I know it's weird to hear me of all people complain that the game does themes too much because I'm captain video games need more thematic cohesion but I don't mean it as a complaint so much as an observation about the games blunt nearly overbearing emphasis on its big ideas at the expense of stuff like verisimilitude it's an aesthetic choice and it might put some people off if the space between borrows it's for our sensibility is from 70s slow burns it borrows its thematic emphasis from student films that feel they need to pack every frame and cut with meaning and you're either on board for that or you're not anyways Martin shows Clara what I assume is his office where he has plans and a miniature model of the theater he's building he tells her he has a room in the theater as part of his contract for designing the building in all of his buildings in fact so that he never has to move on from any of his projects much like his blanket fort he has trouble leaving the safe space he's built for himself again with the walls and the safety some time later do they go to the theater so that he can show off his fancy private room and as they make their way through the building they have a discussion about what separates actors in the audience Martin suggests since the curtain the separates the audience from the actors but Clara asks what happens after the curtain is raised martin repeats not all walls need to be of matter he's adamant that there's some rigid if immaterial division between actor and audience between participant and viewer and Clara or perhaps Martin continuing his previous thought says sometimes closeness comes through separation eventually the two make it to his secret room which Clara jokes was built so that Martin's ego could live there then in the underbelly of the theatre they confess that they're glad they got to know one another the whole scene is romantic in some sense it's a private room the couple are getting to know one another there's confessions of appreciation but the whole date is cold and robotic and I think that informs their relationship sometime later Martin's childhood friend from the opening of the game Daniel dies we watch Martin pay his respects at the funeral home what had separated them in childhood had been cloth but what separates them now is life and death itself notably of all the areas of the funeral home the curtain for Daniel is the only one that's lifted and it's here alone with the curtain raised but Daniel dead that Martin can confess his true love for his friend and a desire for closeness that he couldn't show in life and being separated by death he can finally approach a sense of closeness to his friend but in reality he's just traded one barrier for another we then watch as Daniels coffin is lowered into the crematoriums furnace and the door to the furnace slowly shuts one final impassable barrier between friends [Music] afterwards we find Clara and Martin in bed clara asks martin what he's thinking about and with Daniel's death clearly weighing on him he explores his intimacy issues he explains that he feels like he's always on the opposing side from the people he wants to get close to that he requires that separation in order to feel like he can get close to them he explains to Clara the game he and Daniel played in the blanket port and how it let him feel both the separation and the closeness at once it's not true intimacy but it gives him the shape of it without any risk or vulnerability he doesn't have to leave his safe spaces his blanket fort his buildings his walls he can still get an approximation of closeness by making that division as small as possible but nevertheless still present Clara then suggests they try the same game and soon she's behind a curtain in the room the two touch hands and agree that they can feel each other through the fabric but one of them and it's unclear who wants to be even closer someone suggests grabbing scissors and cutting a hole the top and bottom initially it isn't clear what that means the confusing nature of the dialogue which until this point has largely made things just hard to follow now becomes actively duplicitous and confusing players about who is speaking and with what intention we then cut to a scene that is seemingly metaphorical a courtyard like the one outside of Clara's apartment but with a maze of cloth like sheets representations of all the walls that Martin is built up to keep people out and as you navigate the maze there are two clear metallic sounds like the cocking of a gun that promises violence to come and at the end of the maze you see Clara standing behind a sheet one hole cut by her mouth and one by her crotch the metallic sound was scissors cutting holes in the sheets holes in the walls that Martin has built up to keep himself safe he asked her if she is still in there and her response is that it's a matter of perspective the game jump cuts to Martin alone in his theater apartment and it's here three quarters into a 45-minute long game where things start building from melodrama into outright horror Martin begins walking through the dark under stage of the theater which the game at a previous point had pleasantly reminded you was once called hell and towards a yet unvisited room this trip is intercut with recurring shots of a hallway suggesting a memory that martin can't stop thinking about along the way eventually martin reaches his destination and as dark music plays you enter a temple a groom with a figure encased in its harp with the same mouth and crotch holes cut into the fabric is it a body a sex thing and before you can even take that scene in we then cut back to the hallway for the final time it seems to be a flashback to Martin's childhood possibly in his teen or preteen years we're taller than we were during the blanket port scene but were not yet fully grown Martin approaches a washroom enters and in quietly skulks about meanwhile an unknown person in the shower calls out his name and asks if everything's okay the shower curtain operating like the blanket for it the curtain and the sheets a separator that makes Martin feel able to get close to whoever's behind it while still keeping them safely apart as Martin leaves the bathroom he turns around abruptly for one more look at we don't know who and the game smash cuts to Clara behind the curtain ominously silent in a game all about dialogue and then match cuts from the hole in the sheet that lets you see Clara's mouth to the crematorium where Daniels coffin burned the implications of all of these images are starting to get pretty ominous you then awaken in the dark of the under stage wondering where Clara is you call out to her thinking that she had already gone home you think she's teasing you so you ask her to stop and show herself you make it back to your secret room and see a figure hiding behind the curtain where you played your little game and you beg her to come out to show herself but she won't so you approach the curtain that separates you pull it aside and and the lights go out and where a ghostly image had faded there are holes in the wall a sign of violence perhaps or an extension of the metaphor that the comfortable barriers Martin had built up or crumbling Martin Klaus is way out of his room and then the under stage in the complete dark and as he makes his way through the halls he says please don't go Daniel we make it out into the main stage where we see two chairs set up for dialogue just as in the fort from our childhood we approach them and they [Music] there's a lot to unpack here and a lot of it is vague and I'm not going to pretend that I have all the answers did Martin kill Clara there's a lot of evidence to suggest that he did the tarp covered body the ghastly after image in her hiding spot the holes in the walls the juxtaposition of klaris silent and unmoving behind a sheet and Daniels cremation but some of the chronology doesn't quite make sense when the tarp scene happens there were no holes in the curtain but when Martin presumably dies at the end they're still there could the body under the tarp have been someone else could it have been Daniel has this whole sordid affair played out before is that why he calls out to Daniel in the dark but if Martin killed both Clara and Daniel then who killed Martin and stuffed his body in the walls for the intros news clipping was it the literal ghosts of the people he had wronged are all three truly dead or was Clara never actually killed what she simply kept at such a distance by Martin's walls that he never got to know what she was truly capable of until it was too late and maybe it's just me but it's easy to read the noise and flash of that last flicker as a cigarette lighter and we know that Clara smokes even if the grainy nature of the game prevents us from knowing exactly who was standing there I tried when Martin meets Clara and she mentions she recognizes him from staring out of her window there's some discussion about how when the lights are on we can only see ourselves reflected back at us but when the lights are off we can see out and observe others this has brought up again at the theater when discussing the actors in the audience there is the audience the people in the dark staring in hopes of seeing some artificial performative truth and there are the actors who perform for the boyars but see honesty and real truth and voyeurism and this motif has carried through the game we regularly cut back to Clara's window at various points and sometimes the lights on and sometimes the light is off but who is the actor and who is the audience here who is putting on a show for voyeurs and who is observing from a distance is Clara going through the motions of a performative relationship with a man who wants to experience intimacy but can't actually get close like an audience and therefore couldn't read the signals before it was too late or is Martin the actor performing intimacy but doing nothing but building walls and emotionally isolating himself while Clara continues her attempt to see him but can only do so through dividers at first a window in her wall in the dark and later holes and sheets and holes in his emotional walls or is the whole of the space between an extended metaphor less character is meant to be approached as individuals with agency in a narrative and more figures in a dissection of intimacy and vulnerability despite only being about 45 minutes long the space between is a really dense text that can support a number of different reads you can view it as a meditation on the nature of individuality how the dialog system suggests identity is porous but how its protagonist insists that there are fundamental divisions between himself and others that might not actually exist you can view it as a bit of a meta text the author audience conversation extending to the game itself a performance that Christoph Frey is engineered while you watch and the back-and-forth relationship that that implies the games title screen does open in Clara's apartment with the light off after all implying it as you looking out onto a metaphorical stage but at its core the space between is I think at least to me a tragic parable about a man who was obsessed with defining relationships with others not by what connected them but by what separated them and ultimately who was that desire for safety that inability to be vulnerable and truly know other people that doomed him one way or the other happy Halloween [Music]

Channel: Errant Signal

Views: 83,853

Rating: 4.9717741 out of 5

Keywords: errant signal, horror, halloween, the space between, christoph frey

Id: 4GzzcepN2yE

Length: 19min 2sec (1142 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 30 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/scorchedneurotic]

Campster is on fire this Halloween, been enjoying his editing, writing and presentation a lot on these past couple of videos.

On a limb I would say this one is probably my favourite video of his. o.o