GAME REVIEW: Unpacking made me relive every stage of my life
An emotionally compelling narrative, told solely through gameplay
Game: Unpacking — Release: 2021 — Platform: Nintendo Switch
I’m coming to this game a few years late, and I regret that heavily; Unpacking is one of the best games I’ve ever played, and it should go to the top of your list to play next.
You play as Sadie (or your own name), starting in 1997 as a child, and progressing to 2018 through eight key moments in your life. In each of these “levels”, you’re unpacking your possessions from your boxes as you move into a new home under various circumstances.
Gameplay is incredibly simple: open the box, pick up the next object, and figure out the right place to put it. The soundtrack composed by BAFTA-winner Jeff van Dyck helps set the mood for both the highs and lows of this game, and extensive Foley work was done for each object in the game to create 14,000 unique sounds for picking objects up, moving them around, and putting them down.
Technically a puzzle game with “a character you never see and a story you’re never told”, as developer Witch Beam puts it, in truth the narrative is deftly interwoven through the gameplay, without needing to use words to communicate story to the player.
And that narrative is extremely compelling, to the point I cried several times while playing this game. Unpacking is a game that draws heavily on your own nostalgia for the 1997-2018 time period, as well as eliciting an empathic response from an audience who are likely to have lived through similar experiences.
Admittedly, the further you drift away from living in the cultural context of the creators behind the game, the more you may struggle to identify certain objects, and thus where you are supposed to place them. This is even more important because part of the narrative impact comes through seeing what objects you bring to your next home, and what you leave behind.
On the other hand, the game was even more relatable to me because I shared the cultural context of the protagonist, even her Jewish identity; finding place to put a Hannukah dreidel and a Game Boy on Sadie’s shelf in her 1997 childhood bedroom reminded me of organizing my own bedroom as a kid.
Then Sadie moves to her university dorm in 2004, and I relive leaving my own parent’s home to stay at university. She moves out of student housing to live with two roommates in 2007, and part of the puzzle challenge is that she can’t move anything that her roommates have placed…and they’re very inconsiderate people who didn’t make any space.
But what really gets upsetting, and intentionally so, is 2010, when you move in to your boyfriend’s apartment. You can move around his things, but he hasn’t made any space for you, and you have incredible difficulty managing to fit yourself into a space that is very clearly his and not yours.
At the end of the level, you realize that there isn’t any space on any of the walls in the entire apartment to hang your university degree. To complete 2010, and finish moving in with your boyfriend, you have to suffer the indignity of shoving your degree in the closet, or under your own bed, where nobody can see it.
I spent a lot of time frustrated trying to solve the level, and when I realized at the end what Witch Beam meant, I realized I was directly experiencing Sadie’s anger, and that Unpacking was using the gameplay to put me in the same emotional state as the protagonist inside the game.
And boy does it work; I had to take a step away from the console, because I started thinking about how I don’t know what box my degree is packed away into either. I was angry for Sadie, and I was angry for me, and then the game got more relatable.
In 2012, you’ve broken up with your boyfriend, and you have to figure out how to fit all of your adult items into your same tiny childhood bedroom from 1997. Whether or not you’ve had a bad breakup, pretty much all of Gen Z can relate to the high of moving out for university, thinking you’ve started adulthood, only to be forced back into a sense of childhood.
And you can love your parents deeply, but it doesn’t change the feeling that your life is going backwards instead of forwards. When Sadie unpacks a photo of her and her ex-boyfriend, she pushes the pin through his face when you put it on her cork board…and then you cannot finish the level until you’ve crammed it away in a drawer so she doesn’t have to look at him.
Without explanation, Sadie has gone from an athletic person who had rock climbing gear and soccer trophies to needing heating pads, painkillers, and nutritional supplements; by the end of the game she’s using a cane to walk, and the implication is that she suffered a long-term health problem sometime around her breakup with her ex-boyfriend.
Thankfully, the final three “moves” in your life are happier ones. You help Sadie rediscover her own independence, she finds love as you help her girlfriend Mali move in to Sadie’s home, a home she’s made sure has open space for her partner. And then finally in 2018, the two of them build the rest of their lives together, in a new home with a nursery for their coming child.
Playing this game is an emotionally rewarding experience, even if you haven’t gotten to that final stage of happiness like Sadie has. Because when you finish Unpacking, you finally get to hear Sadie’s voice, as she sings to Mali and their newborn child…and if you haven’t cried yet, this is the point when the tears will really flow.
I believe in the artistic potential of games to elicit strong emotions from those that engage with them, and I can say without any doubt that Witch Beam’s seamless integration of gameplay and narrative in Unpacking advances the art form as a whole.
They should be incredibly proud…and you should buy their game.
Unpacking is available on Windows/Mac/Linux (Steam/Humble/GOG), Nintendo Switch/Switch 2, PlayStation 4/5, and Xbox One/Xbox Series