They get more art supplies, more expensive drawing tablets. When they leave home and study art, they start watching more movies and playing video games, and you see the ones that are important to them stay with them throught the years. You notice they like travelling, and collect little souvenir models from places they visit. Without any text, Unpacking tells you about person growing up and figuring out who they are, sometimes painfully. What's so wonderful about Unpacking is that while it's telling its own story, it also leaves you space to write a few of your own lines in there as well. It's incredibly, incredibly satisfying, finding a place for everything. Your plates and cutlery have to go in drawers in the kitchen. You can't just leave your clothes in a pile on the bed and think, 'I'll get to those later'. The rooms and the items are beautiful, detailed and delicate things rendered in pixels, and the puzzle-y challenge is that you must place everything where it is, more or less, supposed to go. After you complete each level it goes in a photo album, and you can rearrange or replay any levels you like from there. These grow more complicated - the first level is just the kid's bedroom, but you eventually have to contend with a two storey house with a separate kitchen, dining and living room, an office, a walk-in wardrobe and more.

Each of these levels sees you unpacking possessions from boxes, one at a time, and placing them in a home in isometric cutaway. Unpacking takes you through several landmark house moves for the same person, from their 90s childhood bedroom in their new family home, to their university dorm, a shared house with several roomies, single bed couples' flats, and so on.

And comes with the creeping realisation that your life has as much meaning as can be physically stuffed into a few cardboard boxes.Īn extra special high-five, then, to Unpacking, which not only makes this stressful event a delightful puzzle, but also demonstrates that your life and things actually have incredible meaning. And you have to undertake it several times! The packing, the unpacking, the stuffing of old newspaper in gaps between fragile plates: it's all hell. wanting wives) that moving house is one of the worst things to undertake in adult life. It is a truth universally acknowledged (like the status of single men in possession of large fortunes viz. It tells a lovely story without words, leaves you room for interpretation, and invites you to be playful.

This compact little puzzle-story-game has care in every line.

Games like unpacking