I was studying archeology at university, and on our very first day of class, our professor came in with all these garbage bags. He threw them on our tables and said, “Here, go through this and tell me all about the person who they belonged to”.
For an hour we carefully searched each piece of rubbish, dividing it into groups and genres, holding up empty soup cans and crushed hair dye packages as if we were 19-year-olds cosplaying forensics. At the end of the course we were asked to tell our stories because we didn’t know anything about these people, but had carefully examined every single piece of rubbish and projected it outward from there.
Six groups of students stood up and tried to describe the person who owned the garbage, and all six got their answers completely wrong. What we thought were young singles were really professional couples. A sack of rubbish that certainly belonged to a large family actually came from a man living alone. Another bag wasn’t even real, it was just a collection of trash he’d picked up from the trash cans in the faculty office. Neither of us could compare the possessions (thrown away) with the kind of person to whom they belonged.
Our professor’s intention was to begin our archeology education by pointing out its limits. That despite what we were to learn over the next three years, even with an abundance of material evidence in our hands and centuries of professional practice, all you can hope for can be hoped to be an educated guess. You can catalog a person’s belongings, but it’s nearly impossible to tell their full story just by looking through their stuff.
unpacking is a game that tries to tell a story by asking you to go over someone’s stuff.
There are of course differences between this game and my anecdote. In unpacking We are asked several times to take a person’s treasured belongings from the warehouse and place them on shelves and in wardrobes. At no point do we go through their trash trying to find out if four empty beer bottles mean one person has drunk all four or if three friends have stopped by.
But I mentioned it because I think the broader point stays true here. unpacking is a game that gives us insight into a person’s life by tracking their accumulation and storage of goods during the first half of their life. It doesn’t tell a story; there is us Fragments a story, a handful of pieces of a much larger puzzle, and leaves us with wider narrative arcs unspoken and unsolved.
Into this void and without being aware of it, I unconsciously began to fill in the gaps in this person’s life and it wasn’t until I finished the game – in about 4 hours – that I realized that this was my absolute favorite thing to do unpacking.
In terms of what you are actively doing, this is a game that is about picking things up and putting them somewhere while you unpack a woman’s belongings after she has moved. Imagine you are managing your inventory in Resident Evil, just boxes of pens and bras and printer cables. That’s all you are doing here to make things happen, though I may also be briefly selling the act itself here; The game’s pixel art looks awesome, and there is an immensely satisfying combination of animation and sound that makes closing every box and opening and closing doors a joy.
The only rule unpacking has is that whatever you unpack has to be roughly where it belongs. Pots need to be in a kitchen cupboard, for example, and leaving them on the bathroom floor won’t let the game move on to the next phase – so the game is paced and divided, giving you several different combinations of rooms and houses over the course of life of the woman – until you correct that.
The finer details of where everything goes, however, is up to the player. I found myself spending entire levels tidying up my underpants in an annoyingly meticulous pattern while throwing kitchen utensils into every drawer that went, damn order. Either approach is acceptable for the limited amount of progression that is in the game here, but both are also ways that the player can develop the character’s story as the game progresses. How well this person lives their life, what they display where is entirely up to you, and what I found fascinating was that so many of the character traits that came on my mind while playing were driven by my own Actions, nothing written or suggested by the developers.
Starting with our nameless protagonist’s first bedroom of her own in her teenage years, players will spend 20 years pulling things out of boxes when she moves, from dorms to primary homes. There are cute details everywhere that I won’t specifically mention here for you to experience for yourself, but this is a game of warm little moments where you discover items that this person just can’t let go and wonder what the stuff happened that didn’t make it to this last step.
At some point you move in with someone else and I thought, God, that person has to be that person worst, and I’ve seen friends and co-workers say the same thing, for the way this space and the person’s possessions are presented conjures up images that are in contradiction to the character I had developed in my own head. But yesterday I saw someone on Twitter say almost the exact opposite, because the characters she had extrapolated from some interior design decisions and their possessions were completely different.
A more structured narrative would have simply told us who the bad guy is. In unpacking, things are more like a Rorschach test sponsored by Marie Kondo. What one player finds lovable to another can be childish. What I might find depressing, someone else might say, was a learning experience. What looks like another pair of underpants – and this game has one lot of underpants – for me a subtle but decisive indication of the current state of health of this woman.
Until the end unpacking, I felt as if I had been told an intimate story about the most important stages in a woman’s life, with all the ups and downs that she had experienced along the way. The friends she had made, the lovers who had come and gone, what had become of all her dreams and accomplishments. But what would I do? Strictly speaking were shown were only fragments. Trash can be placed on my desktop. I had put these pieces together and built my own story without realizing it, once again led to make educated guesses. Only here there weren’t any wrong answers, just different stories, and in the credits it was one of the most beautiful insights I’ve had in years at the end of a video game.
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