The game everyone is talking about this week is not a glittering racing game or a dark first-person shooter. It is not a massive expansion to a beloved life simulation. No, the game of this moment is an adorable little puzzle game called unpackingwho easily entrusted you with the minor act of unpacking the boxes. I’ve been playing it for the past few days, fully anticipating unpacking to provide some sharp, creative puzzles. I didn’t expect it to tell the chaptered story of a life without a word so effectively.
Then I “met” the friend of the protagonist.
Spoilers will follow for unpacking.
unpacking takes place during a series of crucial movements a woman goes through in the course of her life. During the first level, May 1997, you are clearly a child, with your own room and a raised double bed that works. The next level, January 2004, shows what looks like a college dorm or a starter apartment. In each, your goal is to unpack boxes and generally put their contents in the correct area they should have: clothes in the closet, cutlery in the kitchen drawers, and so on. The challenge as it exists is to find the space.
Contextual cues at each stage can help you determine what is going on at that point in the main character’s life. Law books on the shelf? Well, she must have studied law. GameCube lookalike packaged next to a covered, golden game cover? Like the rest of us, she loves Wind alarm clock. Tums on the shelf and heat stains on the lower back in the closet? Oh, she’s 30 now.
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Continue reading: Hit puzzle game unpacking Has 14,000 (!) Audio files that replicate normal sounds
In September 2010 it is clear that the main character is moving in with a guy. Without showing his obviously stupid face, it can be said that this friend character is just the worst. (My colleague Luke Plunkett has a similar thought in his insightful review of the game.)
You can guess his personality by looking at the room: the grayscale decor, the bourbon-flavored body wash, the guitar on the wall, the miniature sand garden on the bookcase, the 50-pound dumbbells in the living room, the 96-inch Canvas art of an abstract sunset, the meticulousness disinfected throughout. His home has all the hallmarks of a late 2000s bachelorette club, a perfect mix of the required apartment of an idiot from, I don’t know, a rom-com from that period. With that in mind, developer has Witch Beam made.
“It was difficult to define a character in terms of home and objects alone without leaning a little too much, ‘This guy’s just the worst.'” unpacking Creative Director Wren Brier wrote in a recent Reddit AMA. “I hope it’s not too caricaturally awful!”
He is, but not because of his things. (Vanity isn’t a sin. Neither is slim design or sophisticated cleanliness.) It’s because he doesn’t care enough about compromise.
September 2010 is the first stage in the unpacking feels really cramped. Your things – your dolls, video games, and battered kitchen appliances – don’t fit into the level’s default settings. Instead, you’ll also need to move the guy’s existing stuff around to make room. (There is also a feeling that you are stepping into someone else’s room, given the mishmash in aesthetic tastes.) You end up going with anything, but you do the entire job on your own. It’s disgusting, to say the least, that this guy who was determined to move in with someone didn’t even bother to give an inch for his new partner.
I’m at an age where some of my friends say “We’re moving in together!” Chapter with their partners. I won’t put a figure on that or give any specific reasons, but a number of these friends no longer live with their partners. In all cases, it is safe to say that these divisions were the result of two parties that could not find a compromise.
There’s an object in unpacking for which you can’t find an easy place that instantly reveals the depths of this man’s tree-rooted stubbornness: your diploma. It doesn’t fit on the bedroom walls. It doesn’t fit anywhere in the kitchen. While you can move most of the items around his apartment, you can’t move his fancy framed tape posters to make room for your diploma on the gallery wall. The only possible place for it? Under the bed.
In the next level, June 2012, you are back in your child’s room.
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