When we launched Unpacking for the first time, dressed in slack and coffee in hand, we expected to spend a zen moment solving small puzzles. The game from Australian studio Witch Beam actually gives us all of this and more.
Unpacking is, in short, a series of puzzles where you help an anonymous protagonist unpack her belongings during moves spanning two decades. The game begins without explanations, educational or cutscenes. You never even see the person whose most precious possessions you unpack. Rather, it is through the basic mechanics, which consists of pointing and clicking to move these objects from the cardboard boxes to the appropriate places in the house, that we will get to know her. We discover what this person becomes and the trials he goes through through the objects that survive the passage of time, those that are added along the way and those that disappear. You can learn a lot about a person by the things they choose to move and the places in which they put their homes.
The progression is simple and anchored in the stages of a journey towards adulthood. We start with the little room of childhood, in the mid-1990s, in which we will mainly have toys, books and one object in particular that will follow us for a long time. Then there will be larger and later multi-room spaces, such as the university dormitory, apartments shared with roommates or with a lover, etc. We thus discover the relationships that this protagonist maintains not only with her possessions, but also with her lovers, her friends and her family.
Unpacking offers a fascinating approach to environmental storytelling. The story is of course written by the developer, but the developer leaves it up to the player to build the scenes and add a personal touch to them. While the goal is to get things where they are more or less supposed to go, they can be laid out as we see fit, with a few exceptions. We got so attached to our protagonist that we used this free space to place the objects in a way that we thought would have made his life easier. In addition, we get rewards in the form of stickers when we experiment in an interesting way with our object placement.
Objects and environments, rendered in pixel art and in isometric view, are beautiful and carefully designed. The experience is also dressed in soothing background music and a rich sound design that gives each object a delightfully tactile dimension when placed on a surface.
Its mechanics are simple and we can finish Unpackingin a few hours, but it remains a memorable game. His greatest achievement is demonstrating that it is possible to tell a moving story without using tools such as dialogue or storytelling, which are often considered essential. We highly recommend.