I’ve seen a lot of people talking about Unpacking lately. The pixel-art indie tasks you with unpacking boxes of stuff as you move house at different times in your life. All the people I’ve seen talking about it have waxed lyrical about how relaxing it is, how warm and fuzzy it is, and how - excuse me - moving the whole experience is. Turns out everyone has been lying.

Unpacking styles itself as being part puzzler, but it’s mostly just a chill thing you click on until you don’t feel like clicking anymore. The puzzle part comes from the fact that unpacking becomes like Tetris - you need to make sure all the socks fit in the drawer, or all the books on the shelf, for example. As the game goes on, there are extra dimensions to this - the first level is just a bedroom, but it eventually expands to a whole house. You might open a box in the bedroom, but it has pans for the kitchen, and so on.

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While the puzzle part comes from figuring out where stuff goes, the chill part is supposed to come from everything else. Ladles and jellyspoons, it does not.

Moving house is not a very chill experience. Unpacking tries to boil it down to its most wholesome parts, letting you carefully arrange your desk without the hassle of clambering around boxes or lugging heavy computer monitors around the room. There's a sense of nostalgia too - the game begins in 1997, and so unpacking things like a GameCube brings back memories for those of us old enough to remember when gaming peaked.

A bedroom in Unpacking

Unfortunately, Unpacking cannot get away from the fact that unpacking is shit. Some idiot has always put things in the wrong box, and so you have to root through everything before you can really begin to sort anything out. It's bad enough when I'm that idiot, but when it's some stranger in a video game, it's irritating to the extreme. Last night I unpacked all the boxes in my room, meticulously ordering my desk with my ruler, my Rubik's cube, and my diary neatly positioned off to the side, my fat white monitor hogging the top right corner, and an array of action figures front and centre. For a second, I understood the appeal. But then... hang about, where the bloody hell is the keyboard?

Since I primarily use a laptop these days, I had forgotten that PCs, monitors, and keyboards were not one and the same. But also, the room was empty. I had unpacked the four boxes and neatly arranged everything in them. Turns out there was another room. I clicked into the kitchen, opened a box with a few utensils in it, and underneath them all sat my keyboard. Who on earth is packing up a keyboard and chucking a spatula in the box to keep it company?

ponies on table in unpacking

Back to my room I go, throwing everything off the desk in a fit of rage. Or rather, angrily clicking each item and placing them onto the floor one by one until enough space for the keyboard emerged, and then trying desperately to fit my once beautifully arranged items onto any shelf that would have them. A few boxes later, I was finally done, except not really. The game was flashing red at me - I wasn't allowed to keep my football on the floor. Eh? Hang about, I'll put my football wherever the hell I want, thanks.

On the next level I unpacked every single item onto the floor, so I could see exactly what I was dealing with before making a move. This is clearly the wrong way to play the game, but it also felt significantly less stressful than the correct way to play. It did mean everything ended up flashing red with the game informing you that the bathroom floor is the wrong place for the toaster, actually, but at least it meant I could plan ahead.

Moving house isn't fun, and no game can make it so. Apparently Unpacking has a sense of charm and deeper environmental storytelling the longer you play it, but I think it'll be boxed up in the attic of my hard drive before long.

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