I am an incredibly disorganized person. As a result, playing the game normally makes me irrationally irritated at this fictional girl's preferred placement for her things - I looked up a solution image for the first room after a miserable 45 minutes and nearly threw my iMac out the window - but turning off those requirements just made Unpacking, well, interactive unpacking. Using a mouse with a DualSense. It's unpacking but worse. That's really all that needs to be said about why I hated my time with this game.
But because I'm normally so long-winded, a few more notes for the time-rich among you:
• The music is totally good That Kind of Stuff. And that kind of stuff is the kind of stuff I like. Unfortunately, by some stroke of madness it isn't programmed to loop indefinitely, leading to at least a full minute's worth of silence before a given level's soundtrack kicks back in. I can't speak for everyone but, personally, this constantly made me feel like I was taking too long, like the game was staring at me with the plain face emoji flashing incessantly.
• I like the aesthetic, but I also found myself wanting to recognize more clearly what many of these objects are. Sure, smarter folks than I could pick out more references than "ooh, a Gamecube!" but I could only stare at the same vague set of novels for so long.
• I think the logic of the closets, desks and cupboards is absolutely insane.
• Even more insane, who packs their stuff and doesn't label ANY OF IT?! I may be a messy son of a bitch with the organizational skills of a nine year old, but whenever I move I'm AT LEAST gracious to myself enough to label the box with the knives in it. I get haphazardly dumping the living room stuff in the bathroom just to get it the fuck out of your grasp as quickly as possible, but each box felt more like a random item generator than another piece of this girl's puzzle.
• Lastly, and this is just a nitpick compared to all the rest, but without knowing much about this game other than how many podcasters I love and Giant Bomb guest Game of the Year lists (R.I.P., apparently?) it wound up on, I'd forgotten Unpacking was about a very specific girl-to-woman arc. Sometimes I wondered if my maleness, or having named my character "David" after myself, contributed to how little I seemed to understand where certain items go. We should have just all had to be "Rebecca" or whatever.
But because I'm normally so long-winded, a few more notes for the time-rich among you:
• The music is totally good That Kind of Stuff. And that kind of stuff is the kind of stuff I like. Unfortunately, by some stroke of madness it isn't programmed to loop indefinitely, leading to at least a full minute's worth of silence before a given level's soundtrack kicks back in. I can't speak for everyone but, personally, this constantly made me feel like I was taking too long, like the game was staring at me with the plain face emoji flashing incessantly.
• I like the aesthetic, but I also found myself wanting to recognize more clearly what many of these objects are. Sure, smarter folks than I could pick out more references than "ooh, a Gamecube!" but I could only stare at the same vague set of novels for so long.
• I think the logic of the closets, desks and cupboards is absolutely insane.
• Even more insane, who packs their stuff and doesn't label ANY OF IT?! I may be a messy son of a bitch with the organizational skills of a nine year old, but whenever I move I'm AT LEAST gracious to myself enough to label the box with the knives in it. I get haphazardly dumping the living room stuff in the bathroom just to get it the fuck out of your grasp as quickly as possible, but each box felt more like a random item generator than another piece of this girl's puzzle.
• Lastly, and this is just a nitpick compared to all the rest, but without knowing much about this game other than how many podcasters I love and Giant Bomb guest Game of the Year lists (R.I.P., apparently?) it wound up on, I'd forgotten Unpacking was about a very specific girl-to-woman arc. Sometimes I wondered if my maleness, or having named my character "David" after myself, contributed to how little I seemed to understand where certain items go. We should have just all had to be "Rebecca" or whatever.