Editor’s Note: Embarassingly, I confused the rooms. The first room is actually a child’s bedroom and the second room is the dorm room. Edits have been made to reflect that and as a result, an intern has been sacked. Thank you.
I hate moving. I hate everything about it. Packing, moving, unpacking, I guess that’s really all there is to it. But when Tim Dawson of Witchbeam Games told me in an interview about his new game Unpacking and said, “Packing sucks, but Unpacking’s actually not so bad,” I decided to give it a chance. I’m glad I did.
At first blush, a game like Unpacking might not look like a game that rests heavily on narrative. I’d agree. The core gameplay is fairly narrative-lite. But Unpacking gets to tell a story almost no other game gets to tell. The story of life. Most games take place over a period of time when the most exciting things are happening and there’s conflict and struggle. Unpacking isn’t interested in battle, it’s interested in new beginnings. Tim Dawson described Unpacking as “very zen,” and I spent over an hour deciding where to put a poster or a boom box. I think Tim is right.
Unpacking begins in 1997 where you begin unpacking boxes in a child’s room, presumably your own. There’s limited space and you’ve brought so much with you from home, but you want to transform this soulless and empty room into your new home. There are plush dolls to place, board games, books, and posters to put up to turn this carbon copy box into your new abode. Every time you click on your open box you’re given a new item and it’s both an absolute treat and a horrid nightmare every time you get something. I found myself pulling books off the shelf, moving around action figures, realizing there was a drawer under the desk had me moving almost half of the things I had already unpacked. It was clicking and when I had completely unpacked the child’s room I wasn’t treated with a score or extra items, I was treated with a black screen that reads “2004.”
There’s your narrative, the story has begun and you have moved on to college. A small, empty apartment greets you and now you get to furnish a bedroom, a kitchen, and a bathroom. What better way to learn about a person than by unpacking their things. The through-line of having me unpack their things at such a pivotal moment in their lives is exciting, almost thrilling. Who is this person and where will they go next? More importantly, how will their things travel with them? I went from sharing a house with someone that was WAY too big for both of us to living alone in an apartment a third of the size of that house. My lease is almost up and I still have so much stuff in boxes just laying around. There just wasn’t enough space to unpack it all. Will we have to deal with this in Unpacking?
At its core, it’s touching on some very primal puzzle-solving desires. You’re not timed and Unpacking definitely has criteria on the back-end you must follow. Once everything is unpacked, if you’ve got items just strewn about the place the game will highlight them in red, politely and gently asking for some semblance of order. But Unpacking is fairly freeform. Whereas a game like Tetris has you filling lines or something like Grindstone has you following a pattern, Unpacking manages to hit those same notes without being rigid. I think it’s brilliant.
Unpacking is part of our LudoNarraCon 2021 coverage and has a planned release date of 2021 on Steam and Humble Store.
