“Some people will recognise the boards on the walls, they might recognise the gum trees outside … There’s something cool about a well-realised world.” “The first level, the kid’s room, it’s set in a Queenslander,” Dawson says. The game is set in Brisbane – which most people won’t pick up on. They have a kind of built-in dish rack cupboard above the sink, so they don’t need a separate rack.”Ĭertain items – like a treasured soft toy – stay with your character as you move through the world.īuilding the game, they were conscious of representation across cultures (“We had a strong reaction to the dreidel,” Brier says), genders (“the tampons and stuff … dudes are kind of bewildered, but women are like, ‘I’ve never seen that in a game before!’”), and even geography. “And I think it was a Latvian player, she didn’t know what the dish rack was. “Quite a few Asian-American players asked us if they could store stuff in the oven,” says Brier. It also led to the discovery of some unexpected cultural differences. “So it’s really easy to backseat drive, and you learn a lot about someone when you watch them unpack.” “It turns out that people love to watch other people play Unpacking because it’s something that everyone knows how to do. “I remember one friend, she took out this juicer, and she was like ‘I never use these’, and she shoved it as far back as she could behind a bunch of other items,” laughs Brier. Much of the game’s charm lies in its capacity for self-expression, something the team discovered in prototyping. Set to the extremely chilled-out backdrop of guitars and synths, a very personal form of order gradually emerges from the chaotic piles of boxes and knick-knacks. ![]() Settling into the next place always felt like a new chapter of my life was starting, and that’s a feeling Unpacking captures /nIOcgeRMrP- Patrick Lum November 1, 2021 None of these places ever felt like home until I started unpacking: taping the David Bowie poster with torn edges to the wall, finding a flat surface for my ancient record player, and lining up my Harry Potter books in chronological order on the shelves. Packing and unpacking became an almost annual ritual as I transitioned through a series of apartments in various neighborhoods throughout the Philadelphia area. For me, it was a lot: between the ages of 18 and 26, I moved more than half a dozen times. Part of that might have to do with how often you’ve pulled up stakes. You might not think stacking plates and organizing books is compelling, but strangely, it really is. Though the mechanics are simple and the campaign can be completed in a handful of hours, Unpacking is a memorable, delightful game that shows that there are still new ways to tell stories in video games out there. ![]() Unpacking takes you through a series of homes representing an invisible protagonist’s life from 1997 to 2018, and as it turns out, you can tell a lot about a person by the things they take with them. In Unpacking, described by its creators as a “zen puzzle game,” settling into a new place is surprisingly comforting.
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