Unpacking: Game Pass Gems #01
by jeremyf
It takes a game like Unpacking to fully understand the possibility space of the modern games ecosystem. The title sums up, in a single word, the entire experience. In Unpacking, you take all sorts of household items out of moving boxes and place them in a home as you follow the path of one woman’s life. It’s a concept that fits into what I’ve started calling “alt-dev.” Many indie developers are...
It takes a game like Unpacking to fully understand the possibility space of the modern games ecosystem. The title sums up, in a single word, the entire experience. In Unpacking, you take all sorts of household items out of moving boxes and place them in a home as you follow the path of one woman’s life. It’s a concept that fits into what I’ve started calling “alt-dev.” Many indie developers are pursuing games that are nonviolent, art-focused, emotional, and often at least a little queer. The fact that they can find strong audiences is a positive sign of gaming’s life as an artistic medium. Even better, in my opinion, is how a service like Xbox Game Pass puts games like Unpacking at the fingertips of potential players.
Thinking about it, moving is a real-world activity that perfectly translates to a video game difficulty curve. For almost everyone, changing homes becomes more arduous each time as they accumulate more and more crap they need to account for. So it is in Unpacking – you start as a little girl moving into her first bedroom, where your chief concern is where to situate your stuffed animals. As years go by, boxes stack higher, roommates come and go, and you’ll be shuffling items through multiple rooms as you set up your new digs. It’s been six months since I last moved, and the replication in Unpacking is intensely accurate. You can tell which objects are carried forth as sentimental objects and watch some wear down over time. Seeing someone’s life this closely is a rare intimacy. There are sparks of environmental storytelling that are exciting to find, as there is little contextualization outside of them. While I was fully convinced of my shared human experience with the main character, though, I felt more like a hired mover, someone along for the ride, than the embodiment of her. I mean, I don’t even wear bras.
Unpacking’s art style is a total success at fostering that all-important vicariousness. At least four people contributed pixel art to the game, but the depiction of objects is among the most consistent I have ever seen. There are hundreds of them, and nearly all are instantly identifiable. It taps into the recesses of your brain, which facilitates an organizational flow state. This is true 98% of the time; some objects I couldn’t identify and had to click around until the game determined they were in the right place. But to maintain such an appealing and holistic style is no mean feat.
One big tentpole of alt-dev is that the in-game characters are gamers, too. In this case, it’s some more fun storytelling. The woman is clearly a ride-or-die Nintendo fan, going as far to buy a little tray for GBA games. I chuckled when I plopped my GameCube next to my roommate’s PS2, and I was impressed how the artists could interpret around 20 pixels from the box art of The Simpsons: Hit and Run. The idea had not occurred to either me or the developers that a player might not know what a GameCube is until I saw a horrifying tweet about it. Organizing my games is something I take weird pride in, so representing that experience here struck a chord with me. It seems like eventually, she leaves behind the Gamer Lifestyle, which supposes the ridiculous premise that anything could be more important. But the biggest shock was the abandonment of alt-dev’s number one credo: Animals Are King. If you’re an indie game, falling on the wrong side of Can You Pet the Dog is marketing suicide. However, the woman never owns a pet, despite all the accompanying items that would make for interesting unpacking. I suppose allergies can’t be helped.
If I’m riffing right now, it’s because Unpacking really is as simple as its concept. Either you’re into it or you don’t care that much. People who love organizing their Animal Crossing house will get a kick out of it, but it’s not a concept with terribly wide appeal. The story won’t stir any great emotions, either, despite its enjoyable arc. As a Game Pass title, Unpacking is a nice way to spend a free afternoon, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to add it to a wish list. That’s just me, though. If you don’t mind a lot of clicking and you want to relive some of the biggest moments in your life, it’s worth a download.
