It's going to get a bit mainstream for the next few entries of Indie Game of the Week, as I've availed myself of Microsoft's PC Game Pass (they apparently give it away with new PCs, who knew?) for the sake of some GOTY catch-up this month. That also means catching up with some of the bigger Indies of the past couple years, including Witch Beam's well-regarded Unpacking from 2021. Described as a "Zen puzzle game" (as if moving house is anything close to Zen), Unpacking has you opening boxes and finding places for all the possessions of a young woman during pivotal moments of her life. Many of these moments are only made apparent through context, as the game itself is dialogue-free: it starts in a new bedroom for a child in 1997 lining the shelves with stuffed toys and school supplies, moving to a tiny university dorm in 2004 with its own equally tiny en suite, and then the following year a shared house full of nerdy student shit in which you only have access to your room and the shared living spaces.

However, it's fair to say that in Unpacking there's more going on in the micro than the macro. Since your goal is to consider every single object that pops out of each box—the boxes themselves are never labelled, which can often mean finding items intended for other rooms—this fastidiousness is naturally applied to your thought processes behind what has motivated the most recent move and the priorities this unseen woman has placed on her possessions. For instance, you have fewer stuffed toys with each move but a certain precious few, including the stuffed pig seen on the title screen, are always there. A souvenir collection that begins with an Eiffel Tower and a bright red London double-decker bus are among the woman's earliest possessions, but later chapters see them joined by a Leaning Tower of Pisa replica and a Dutch windmill. A framed diploma is a persistent object in every move after the university level, but on one occasion has you stash it away in a drawer because there's no room on the walls of her new boyfriend's trendy high-rise apartment (which may or may not be part of the reason why the next move has her returning to her parents' house). Every object has a story to tell, even if a lot of time it's just cutlery or what feels like hundred pairs of underwear, and what makes Unpacking engrossing isn't just the series of small dopamine kicks as every item is placed exactly where it's supposed to be, but the unspoken reasons behind why they're here at all. It even includes the smallest of cute touches, like a chopping board that has a few more scratches with every move or how there's always more coat hangers on subsequent levels because there were never enough the prior times.

Now, I came to this game not exactly certain what kind of structure it might have. Just dropping items in random spots didn't seem like enough of a workable system to hook a video game onto; thankfully, the developers came to a similar conclusion and so the game will—once every box has been emptied and disposed of—highlight in red every item that is not in an ideal (though not necessarily perfect, since that's not really the intent of the game) place. This might mean stuff left abandoned on the floor or bed, kitchen items intended for drawers that aren't in them, toiletries that have been confused with cleaning supplies and vice versa, and items where you might not have even realized what they were. The game's sharp isometric pixel art style does what it can to make every object's role apparent—the protagonist acquires a modest collection of real-life GameCube games and DVDs, and it's impressive that you can just about make out what they are from the heavily pixellated covers—and if you're struggling there's a console command that highlights object names for a bit more clarity. Without giving away too much, I was stuck on trying to place one particular item—a photo—for a while until I realized what the owner's intent for it was.

Unpacking has a certain wholesomeness and focus on the familiar and the familial that reminded me of another house-arranging game, Gone Home (and not just because both prominently feature a same-sex couple). Even for something as quotidian as a household full of normal possessions and sundries, there's something compelling about the accuracy of the renditions and how those little stories are tied into everything that just makes you want to explore from top to bottom. The game keeps coming up with ways to make each move feel like a natural next step in its protagonist's life while also organically increasing the game's challenge. For instance, a late-game level has you moving to a five room house; previously, you were either focusing on just one or two rooms or moving into an already shared space, and now this is the first time you've had to furnish (to an extent, as the furniture is always already there waiting for you) a whole empty building. Then, to up the ante even more, the next level sees you move three years ahead where you've invited your new partner to move in with you and now the goal is to fit all her possessions around those you just placed, attempting to maximize the limited room by occasionally re-positioning your own items to make up for any inefficiency in the last level. I can respect how intelligently the game is designed, given it has such a straightforward premise of an everyday ordeal we've all had to undergo a few times in our lives. As always when I cover some massively-lauded Indie game some years after the fact, I find I don't have that much more to add to the discourse other than "dang, those plaudits were well-earned".

Rating: 5 out of 5.