I spent a minute thinking of an adjective to best describe Unpacking, and I settled on cozy. Unpacking is a super cozy game. Clean, bright pixel art and a nostalgic 8-bit soundtrack suit the simple, and yet surprisingly deep premise of forming a narrative through moving house and unpacking bags. For me, the whole thing is less about its immediate gameplay — which consists of taking things out of boxes and putting them around your new room, apartment, or house — and more about the comfy atmosphere it creates. That means a few design hiccups don’t really take away from the overall package.
The “story” told in Unpacking is one you piece together yourself through observation. As an extension of the main character (a nameless girl/woman), you time-travel through a handful of important moves — starting in elementary school and ending, well, later — and unpack her stuff, dropping it on surfaces, in drawers, or under the bed. Since nothing is spelled out for you, putting together any kind of narrative is your prerogative, and not one that affects the gameplay… usually, at least (more on that later).
I’ve moved a lot of times, so this concept was immediately relatable and alluring. Forming a narrative based on where someone goes and the things they own — what they choose to bring along with them, and what they choose to get rid of — is actually pretty poignant and personal. I projected a lot of my own principles and experiences on this unnamed protagonist just by looking at her possessions. “A new ukelele? No way she’s going to play that! That goes under the bed!”… A few years later, she’s gotten a stand for that ukelele, and now it’s displayed in the living room. Goes to show that you never really know what a person is going to latch onto and grow with; what’s going to become a meaningful object in that person’s life. Just because I played a ukelele for a week and then never touched it again, doesn’t mean this person will.
In a sense, I see Unpacking as two separate narratives: In one way it’s distinctly the protagonist’s — you see her coloring books and crayons when she’s in elementary school. 15 years later, you see her professional art equipment and awards. Other parts of the narrative are your own—She always takes a dreidel with her, but does she display it prominently on her bedside table, or hide it away in a drawer? That’s up to you. Is the protagonist neat or messy? That’s also up to you—group clothing by type and color, or just stack it up randomly. In these ways, Unpacking is about this nameless main character, but it’s also about you.
And yet sometimes it’s also about what the developers want you to do, which can be limiting, if not frustrating. This is because Unpacking restricts where you can put certain objects in order to pass the level. Usually, placement is relatively free and intuitive, but sometimes where I wanted to put an item and where the developers wanted me to put that item didn’t mesh. For example, I couldn’t put the protagonist’s drawing tablet in a drawer, I had to keep it on her desk. I couldn’t hang her college diploma on the bathroom wall, I had to put it under the bed. I was forced to put her diary in her desk drawer, not on the shelf, etc.
One specific point where I thought the game was actually bugged happened when I couldn’t put a photo up on the girl’s corkboard with the rest of her photos, even though it was the only obvious place to put it. It was the last object I had to put away to finish the level, but it kept flashing red — the game’s way of telling me “Nope! Put it somewhere else!”. Where, though? It had tacks on it, it was a photo, it was obviously meant for the corkboard.
Turns out it was a photo of the main character and her ex-boyfriend, and I had to put it somewhere she wouldn’t see it, like the cabinet. I was apparently supposed to know that, since there was a tack going through his face, but I just didn’t realize it.
You could chalk this oopsie-daisy up to me being dense, but I think part of it comes from the game’s design: Unpacking doesn’t tell you anything, for better or for worse. For the most part, it doesn’t matter if you don’t catch something that’s going on in the main character’s life… but in that one instance, it hindered me from progressing in a game that, in my opinion, doesn’t seem like it should be limiting player decisions.
In other words, Unpacking felt very personal, until I was reminded that I was unpacking someone else’s life, using the developer’s rules, and I had to cater to them once in a while. Luckily there’s a function in the accessibility menu that lets you turn off restrictions and put things wherever you want.
In terms of how Unpacking controls, it’s relatively smooth. You pick things out of boxes one by one, but you can take everything out and put it on the floor first, and then put it all away once you know what you’re dealing with. Despite the occasional limitations of placement, discussed above, the game is still relatively liberal on where you can place things. Plants can go here or there; books can go on whatever shelf you want; clothes can be meticulously organized or just thrown in a heap. 95% of the stuff I unpacked was allowed to be placed where I chose to place it; it was only those pesky remainders that took me out of the experience.
Playing with an Xbox controller, it was occasionally finicky to get my cursor in exactly the right spot, since you’re often dealing with very small surface areas — for example, needing to click on a sliver of wood to close an opened door. Sometimes I’d accidentally grab things next to what I meant to grab.
Another slight restriction is the inability to rotate the room. This makes sense since the game is drawn in pixel art — the developers would have to draw each room and object multiple times from different angles, and that would take ages. It also might make things overly complicated with certain items disappearing from screen depending on the angle. An issue only appears when certain spaces can’t be viewed in their entirety, like the obscured corner of a cabinet or a drawer, making placement in those areas tricky. Sometimes it felt like I should be able to place another item in a cabinet but couldn’t. This wasn’t a big problem, just something I took notice of.
Finally, although the game’s pixel art looks great, I sometimes had no idea what things were supposed to be. Bathrooms have various random boxes and bottles of things I could only assume were tampons, ibuprofen, and perfume… but couldn’t really be sure. There were certain boxes that I thought were books, but only later realized were 3DS games. There was some kind of mystery sweater/sock thing I’m still clueless about. How many of the things in Unpacking you can identify is most likely directly linked to how culturally similar you are with the game’s creator. For example, I could identify the graphics tablet because I had one growing up, but I could understand someone else looking at it and having no clue.
Usually this doesn’t matter, since most things can be intuitively categorized as “stuff that goes on a shelf, stuff that goes in a drawer”, etc., but I could see it giving some people a problem.
At the end of the day, none of the small nitpicks I had with Unpacking took away from the entire package. I would have liked a bit more freedom with where to put things, but that can be remedied by checking a box in the menu. Overall, Unpacking is a wonderfully executed game about observing someone’s life through the moves they make. It’s calming, bittersweet, and fun— which is exactly what it’s meant to be.
I played Unpacking on an Xbox Series S, using Gamepass. It took me three mornings for a total of ~3 hours.
