Unpacking Review (Switch eShop) | Nintendo Life

Videogames: pure escapism. Represent extreme, often immoral experiences that you would never dare to explore in real life: stealing a car, murdering hundreds of people, growing a mustache, and killing turtles with guns. But unpacking ups the ante: how would it feel to keep your silverware in the second drawer down? Yes, a trip into the mind of a psycho, depending on how you play it, of course.

If you’re a normal, kind-hearted person who properly maintains your cleaners under the sink and your toaster on the counter, Unpacking is a peaceful and meditative game. Presented with a few homes and a few boxes, you unpack personal belongings and place them as you wish around the home. Each scenario represents a house move at a different time in the main character’s life, beginning with the installation of his own bedroom in the family home.

A story unfolds entirely through this game, without any access to the protagonist except through his belongings, which change over the years, providing a poignant insight into the true constants of a life: the things that matter most to us. and we conserve, and the things you just never get to change. Moving home is an emotional, hopeful, and perhaps traumatic experience, providing perfect story rhythms for the biography of this invisible person.

The practicalities of this process involve moving a cursor to click a box and delete an item. Items come out in a predetermined order and each must be placed somewhere before another can be carried. This leads to very natural approaches, such as laying everything on the bed and deciding how to organize it or, if you’re not embarrassed, just placing unsurpassed shoes under a shelf as they emerge.

Of course, this interaction is crying out for a mouse, but rather than just letting the Switch version float in the shadow of the PC, Humble Games and developer Witch Beam have gone the extra mile to make the controls work. The joystick controls have useful settings for cursor speed and for switching the left and right joysticks, handheld gamers can use the touch screen directly, and with the joy cons separated, there is the option of Wii-style motion controls with intuitive pointer. The implementation is anything but lazy and it pays off with great ease of use. HD Rumble is also carefully incorporated and makes you want the tangible satisfaction of folding each box complete.

The pleasure of performing these basic actions is due in large part to the wonderful sound design, which makes each element delightfully tactile when you hear it connect to the surface you choose to place it on. The inherent intimacy of organizing someone’s toiletries and underwear is made incredibly personal by the feel of the items you come to know after unpacking and ordering multiple times. As a result, it is impossible not to work with care and respect in a game format that could easily become clinical if limited by riddles or dressed in beep-boop video game isms.

However, Unpacking is absolutely a video game, leveraging some established game design ideas to engage the player in the action. Like a platformer, for example, it will teach you basic skills and then challenge you to apply them in new scenarios, Unpacking teaches you what kind of space an item can fit in and then changes the spaces on offer in the next new home. . The challenge extends as certain collections of items grow over the years, which means it suddenly seems messy to keep them all in the corner of a desk, or it takes two shelves instead of one. None of this is outlined by rules, achievements or failure conditions, everything is self-imposed by the player, driven by the desire to respect this person whose life is restarting over the years, through their private ups and downs.

All of these mechanical considerations apply for the peaceful litter box to function effectively. It is almost a game that is not built with an intuitive understanding of games. The goal is clear, to unpack all the boxes, but instead of an opportunity to score points and fight for an S rank, it only gives the game a purpose so that there is a sense of direction. Sometimes an item is boxed for the wrong room, but instead of throwing a curve ball to test your wits, it simply pushes you to move and consider other spaces, discouraging a purely routine, room-by-room approach that it could be tedious. It’s using effective video game tricks and doing something more subtle than a shooter, but more impactful than a meandering world of independent ideas.

Unpacking’s approach to ambient storytelling is fascinating. Where a walking simulator wants you to discover and experience a scene that has been carefully prepared, here you will build the scene yourself, actively feeling the nature of this person’s life story, instilling it with your own care and purpose. However, the developer is the author and control of the story. The plot is simple, but the experience of it is shocking.

conclusion

Unpacking manages to do several things very well, all at the same time. It’s a moving story told through interaction, provides the creative play space of a great dollhouse set, and cleverly applies established game design ideas from completely different genres. Its only real flaw is the repetition which is a necessary by-product to get your message across. An effort has been made to make the controls satisfying on the Switch, and the visual and sound design are charming throughout, making Unpacking, like any sane person’s silverware, absolutely top-notch.