Unpacking

Witch Beam. 2021.

Unpacking is a quaint exercise in narrative. In it the player uses a mouse, a left analog stick, to unpack a woman's belongings as she moves from home to home throughout her life. As she progresses through life the player unpacks more and more of her things, each level growing more complicated as we are forced to unpack multiple bedrooms, bathrooms, and other living spaces.

Here's how it works: when a level begins we, the player, are presented with the next home our protagonist will be occupying, usually we start in the bedroom. In the rooms there is already furniture and a few items here and there. We see amongst the furniture some large cardboard moving boxes. We click on a box to open it and to remove an object. Then, we drag the object over to a surface or drawer. Sometimes, the player has to rearrange a few things to make a good place for that object to live; sometimes, we are able to place it where it needs to go immediately. Then, we return to the cardboard box to retrieve the next thing. The boxes disappear in a puff of stage magic once they are empty. This unpacking action continues until all the boxes are empty and have vanished. Then, so long as we have placed all the items somewhere the game designers approve, the level ends. We see a snapshot of the room we just completed slide into our scrapbook and a single line caption is written below it. The captions are generic and rarely lend to the narrative ("Wow, a shower window with a view!")

When the protagonist is a child we put away books and games; we arrange stuffed animals on the bed and toys on the shelf. In college she needs us to figure out how to fit her shoes in the tiny dormitory wardrobe. A few moves later, we are shoving a new boyfriend's slick, masculine, hair products aside to cram the modern bathroom storage full of colorful, girly bath products.

When she has to move back in with her parents we hastily throw all her mom's sewing supplies under the bed to make room for her things in her old childhood bedroom. Evidently, they made it into a combination guest room and sewing room when she went off to college. It is moments like this that make the narrative feel the most true to life and relatable, when the spaces have their own lives stretching before and after we arrive.

While the unpacking process is ongoing the player is delighted by the surprise of what they get with each click of a moving box. A book, a slipper, a stuffed animal. We learn about the woman in the center of the story as we riffle through her things. The game is often quite amusing as we pull out something unexpected in the wrong room and we say "Oh, HERE'S the salt shaker. It was in the bathroom box for some reason."

These details bring us into the reality of the world of Unpacking, the autobiography and mundanity of the everyday. We remove something from the box and piece together not just where it's going to go but also where it has been. We begin to recognize a poster for a band her old roommate loved, it's grown a bit worn over the years but we will still hang it up. The big difference between 23 and 32 is not that you stopped liking the poster; but that without a frame it won't be going up in the living room.

Furthermore, we can infer a few things about her. We know she has a lifelong love for games and anime. We know she's British. We know she walks with a cane, or at least that she owns one. We know she received a liberal education. We know she's probably never owned a pet. We know she's ended up with a woman but she dated a stuffy, businessy kind of man first. We know she finally published her children's book. This is the scope of the information we can glean about the protagonist from playing the game: simple, relatable, and inoffensive.

However, what was merely inoffensive before will be traded for a bland, conservative cliche as the designers flounder to write an ending. The final levels of the game, the final chapters of the story, are about discovering affluence, buying a home, and raising a child. We see the awards piling up (not just our protagonist but her partner's as well), copies of her published book need to be shelved in the office, we have to unpack both bathrooms, an enormous kitchen, and several large, comfortable living spaces; then, we face the final boss of Unpacking, the nursery.

I won't go into the mechanical details, there are a bunch of toy blocks and we must discern where to place them on the floor so that the game will consider them Put Away (no aura, neutral) rather than Left Out (red outline, cannot complete the level.) It's a very boring and disappointing end to a game with a fantastic premise and systems for telling a story.

The most interesting part of the game is when you are moving her into her new boyfriend's apartment, and doing your best to find a place for her in this clash of styles. All this guy's furniture, cabinetry, appliances, and even bathroom hardware are uniformly chrome, steel, glass, and black. The place is small but crammed to the gills with a kind of Sharper Imagine-cheque -- everything is severe, orderly, and cramped. This feels like the strongest expression of the game's premise: the story of life through stuff. This apartment is so small for two people with so much, it's a job to make everything work together. The protagonist's stuff, more Urban Outfitters-esque fair, certainly makes things more vibrant around the flat but there's barely room to walk. We easily grok that this relationship is as stifling as this home and the next place we are moving her into is the spareroom at her parents. Nothing more has to be said about this chapter, it completes its own drama.

And herein is the issue with the rest of the game: we detect no conflict, no antagonist, no obstacles in the heroine's life. Her next place is adorable, she finally has a halfway decent kitchen and the visual details betray the care placed in the verisimilitude of the graphics of a mid-century, landlord sustained, urban apartment. You can almost feel the layers of paint on everything. It's so charming and optimistic, just another step in life. And then, well...

We come to the conclusion of our brief game. We may begin to think of all the things our protagonist didn't need us to unpack. She owns no protest signs, no books about any weighty subjects, zero evidence of any political involvement; not even a pride flag. I don't think she even recycles. She just sort of floats through life with her french press and growing number of stuffed animals, the perfect millennial. And then her life ends with a baby. I wish it didn't! I would love to see how she grows old, but growing old is a bummer. Too many nuances, what does she bring with her to the senior living facility? Where shall we display her urn?

I mean really, what was I expecting the game to end with? Popping her body in a coffin? Of course not, but still... Unpacking just isn't the game to challenge or transgress the Cozy Games market. By strictly maintaining a vibe of superficial nostalgia (old game systems, stuffed animals, boxy gray PC) and cutesy, millennial decor (darling little houseplants, funky mugs, pastel everything) we see the blandest parts of ourselves sold back to us. And barely a life gets lived and anything which would be messy, challenging, or contradictory left out of the telling.

Unpacking experiments with a few elements of narrative design, and sees some success. There's some pleasant diegesis, the player can take screenshots once they've unpacked a camera; the scrapbook we see at the end of every level is a real object the protagonist needs us to shelve in every new home. Like I mentioned before, the basic loop of removing an item from a box fits perfectly into the larger loop of recognizing these objects and watching them fit themselves into a larger, implied story, however shallow.

The proof of the problem of Unpacking is this: there are wrong places to put items away. While I was playing I placed the tampons in the living room and declared "she's a feminist!" This was a joke, but the game would not let me proceed. I couldn't finish the level until I had built the rooms the way she wants them, or the way the designers want them. This is how we know it's not a dollhouse. I cannot alter the story even a bit, I can't even put mugs around the table in the living room to say "Oh, look they are having tea."

The game designer comes in the room and chides me "Those saucers need to go in the cabinet!" "Pick up these incense sticks!" "The Newton's Cradle does NOT go on the bookshelf!!" Maybe her hairbrush can be placed anywhere you'd like on the bathroom counter but she isn't the kind of person to carpet the living room with a patchwork of facedown books and the game will not allow you to proceed until this is rectified. But it should. I should be allowed to shape more than the arrangement of the blu-rays. How might her life proceed if I decide to hide the birth control early in her college career? What if I put the video games away in a box and pull out all the art supplies? What if she starts building sleeping pallets and opens her home up as a safe house?

Let's be clear, I think Unpacking is a great concept which executes on what it does quite well. I do not believe that answer is simply to add a branching narrative, just a more interesting one. The concept has so much potential one feels like it has left so much central mechanical idea on the table. The modern, western, urban setting helps create something familiar to it's assumed audience (me, frankly) but fails to move beyond the kind of autobiography a sitcom character might have: they lived in a few different apartment with all their stuff and then moved to a bigger place with all their stuff and had a kid.

Unpacking is more of a showcase for narrative design techniques. It fails to live up to its potential by stifling the playspace. By keeping me on brand so strictly I no longer feel like a silent gameplayer, peacefully exploring the life of another. Piecing things together and discovering a human story. Instead, I am just a clueless helper, swinging by on moving day after the heavy stuff has already been dropped off and getting chastised for leaving a mug on the table -- what if it leaves a ring?