Unpacking 'Unpacking'

Some Thoughts About a Game I Liked

I like organising my library at home. I do it several times a year. Sometimes it’s a full-scale project; like the desecration of Euston Station, I mercilessly tear down the old, and replace it with the new. Beauty gives way to cold practicality. Other times I tinker at the edges, neatening up a shelf of books here, creating space to fit a brand-new hardback there. Once I organised my books by colour until they formed an infinite prismatic loop. I could only tolerate it for a few weeks and quickly rearranged everything back, but I didn’t at all regret it because the whole process was fun for me. Sitting down on my carpet sorting my books by size and theme (alphabetising them is mad unless one is an actual librarian) was oddly mediative. I dipped in and out of forgotten novels and abandoned comics that had languished at the back of my shelves. I remembered which book I bought at which bookshop, I lovingly examined my signed editions and I put a few books at the top of my ‘to-read’ pile – and I couldn’t wait until I could go through the whole process again.

Unpacking by Witch Beam studios simulates the strange satisfaction of organisation. It may seem weird to play a video game that consists solely of moving objects around different rooms, after all, video games serve predominantly as power fantasies.  Games are a medium with an emphasis on activity, the player is in control. When you’re at the cinema you are almost totally passive. You can’t adjust the volume, you can’t pause the film or rewind. You’re stuck like the Warren Beatty character watching the disturbing montage in The Parallax View. At most you can close your eyes and cover your ears. When you play a game, you’re in the control. You decide what happens next, you shape reality to your will, you act upon your environment. This could involve cleaving your enemies in half like in God of War, but it could also be as simple as building a house in Minecraft; the game is in your hands. Unpacking gives you none of this. Instead of power, it conveys a sense of zen.

Unpacking has no tutorial, and very little text. The gameplay is so minimalist that it’s barely there. The game is short and can be completed in as little as four hours. Yet, it is one of the best gaming experiences I’ve had in years. In the first level of the game you are shown a child’s bedroom, empty apart from some basic furniture and a few cardboard boxes. The game never tells you what to do but the objective is clear: unpack the boxes. Items emerge one by one from the boxes as you click to pick them up, and click again to place them. A football, a stuffed toy, some picture books, a football trophy, a poster. It is up to you where you place them. Do you put the football under the bed, or on the shelf? What order should the picture books go in? Should they be stacked vertically or horizontally? Where should the poster be? And, most importantly, how should you place the stuffed toys? There is no wrong answer to any of these questions, in fact there are very few wrong answers in the game at all, for it less a puzzle and more of a vehicle for player expression. You as the player place the objects where you want to, and through the choices you make, you craft the game’s story.

A few things are fixed: the character whose objects you’re unpacking is a woman. The first level, in the childhood bedroom takes place in 1997 and the character is implied to be eleven. The final level of the game takes place in 2018. But beyond those fixed parameters, Unboxing offers you almost infinite choice; until the doesn’t. There are moments that the game where decisions are forced upon you, and this is where the real storytelling magic emerges. Initially there are small moments of confusion in the unpacking process. Between the books and the stuffed toys of the first level I unpacked a left shoe, and then several boxes later I discovered the right shoe. Such a small moment made me chuckle and recall the miseries of some of my own unpacking. At one point I also unpacked several pairs of bras; naturally I was unsure what to do with them. But the key moment came at the end of level, when all the boxes had disappeared and the room was tidy, everything seemingly in its correct place. An object started glowing red; I wouldn’t be allowed to complete the level unless I placed it correctly. This was a diary, complete with a padlock, and it could only be put in two ‘right’ places: in the drawer of a desk, or under the protagonist’s pillow, right where a girl’s secret diary should be.

The gameplay of Unpacking builds upon itself as the levels progress. From the childhood bedroom you move into a university dorm and then into an apartment with a roommate. Each level has more items to unpack and more rooms to place them in. Slowly details are revealed about the main character. The dorm room is small but cosy, full of the typical student knick-knacks. When the protagonist moves in with a flatmate the puzzle becomes more challenging. There’s not much space for both of them – you’re not allowed to move your friend’s things that are already in the flat – yet somehow everything is made to fit. Objects reappear from level to level, notably the stuffed toys, but some of them disappear forever. Like everyone, the protagonist is keen to forget her guaranteed-to-be-embarrassing teenage diary, so she doesn’t take it with her when she goes to college and it is likely gathering dust in an attic somewhere.

My favourite level is when the protagonist moves into an apartment with her boyfriend. It’s different from all of the proceeding levels. Whereas before the rooms were homey but slightly run-down, the boyfriend’s apartment is sleek, clearly high up in a skyscraper somewhere. He’s a big fan of coffee, with all the equipment set out in his luxury kitchen. This is the first stage of the game where you can move items that don’t belong to you, so there’s a real juggling act over where to place all of your items. Do you put the sandwich press on the kitchen counter, or do you hide it away on the top shelf because it’s not going to be used anyway? For the first time in the game unpacking becomes difficult, less of a pleasure and more of a chore. There are subtle hints that the relationship between the two won’t work out: their hobbies and interests are different, and there seems to be a big gap in the financial situation between them, yet the most obvious clue comes in the form of an object. In the previous level you take out a framed certificate out of one of the cardboard boxes. It’s your college degree, and you very proudly hang it up in the first apartment you share with your friend. In the boyfriend’s apartment there’s no good place to put your degree, however. It’s an ominous sign. I ended up putting it under the bed. After you finish placing the all of your items in the boyfriend’s apartment there comes an emotional gut-punch. The next level, set two years later sees you unpacking in your childhood bedroom once again.

I won’t spoil the rest of the game, as I encourage you to play it for yourself, but it really is a special experience. It made me realise how much of our lives are tied up in the material things. I don’t mean that as a criticism at all. Nowadays it is common to prioritise experiences over objects. Travel companies thrive on selling you this fantasy. The perfect hotel, the perfect flight, the perfect destination, the perfect meal; all of these are meant to add up to the perfect experience. And sometimes you remember those perfect experiences, but oftentimes you don’t. For me, they often blend into one big sybaritic haze. Objects are frowned upon as they are emblematic of capitalist excess, but they don’t have to be – lots of the experiences that people are after are in fact much more self-indulgent. In Unpacking, objects tell a story. When an item that I hadn’t seen for a few levels suddenly reappeared, I filled in my own backstory as to what had happened to it. Experiences are fleeting, but objects are more permanent. We pass them on, we sell them, we fix them up, we cherish them. In the game, objects come to represent a person, and reflect a whole personality. Think of the objects that make up your own life. What are you fond of? What have you carried with you for years, for little reason? What would you save from a housefire?

For something as inherently uncinematic as unpacking boxes Unpacking feels like a movie. In many ways it is like one of those American coming-of-age dramas but really the closest thing I can compare it to is the opening montage of Up. The one that hit me like a freight train even when I was young, and that I refuse to watch again now that I’m older. It’s the height of Pixar’s emotional manipulation, and in five brief minutes it shows the lives of Carl and Ellie, from the moment they first met, to the twilight of their years. A whole life in a brief and powerful capsule. Unpacking feels a lot like that. For a video game it’s very short and tells its story powerfully and sensitively. It never feels as manipulative as Up but it does play with your emotions nonetheless.

I love Unpacking’s sly little details; the way that CDs slowly disappear from the boxes in the game as time moves on and the age of physical media comes to a close; the intricately drawn pixel art of the books and DVDs that had me looking closely for their real life inspiration; the moment you pull out five copies of the same book from a box and realise that the protagonist has become a published author; the gorgeous soundtrack that subtly changes from level to level. The best thing is that these little nuggets of storytelling come naturally, and in the form of gameplay. The game designers understand that the trend of making video games more like movies is an artistic dead-end. Rather than telling the story to you through endless text and cutscenes, Unpacking lets you experience it and fill in the details for yourself. It’s a smart, elegant piece of work, and I wish there were more games like it.