You never meet the protagonist of Unpacking. And yet, by the end of the game, you know her better than any other video game character I can think of.
The premise of Unpacking is pretty simple. You have to unpack a series of rooms, like your first dorm room when you go to college. Each time you click on a box, you get an object from that box. You have to find a place for it. The default settings of the game have ‘correct’ places (so you can’t put a yoga mat on a toilet and call it a day), though you can turn that off if you just want to free-form unpack things. Each level is a more complex space, starting with a single childhood bedroom and moving up to apartments and houses you move into after college.
That’s really all there is to it. But Unpacking does a lot with that. The game’s soundtrack is soothing and enjoyable. The way objects ‘click’ into place when you move them against the desired surface just feels good. The only real friction I encountered was when I unpacked an object and simply had no idea what it was. Where does this long… red… line thing go? I have no idea. After a level full of organizing bookshelves and desk space, having one or two random objects that simply do not mean anything to you can be frustrating. It’s a small irritation, but I do wish there was some way to learn what an object is.
“Finally, my own room!”
Video games often struggle to give characters a sense of interiority. In books, the author can give us a peak inside a character’s head. In film, an actor can emote, broadly and subtly, to lend that sense of an inner-life. Games have tried to mimic that, often with expensive and elaborate cutscenes interrupting the gameplay. They have, by and large, failed to do so. Pixels lack the depth of expression in the human face.
But video games are different from books and film, not lesser than them. Part of the appeal of Dark Souls, to me, is the way it uses environmental storytelling. There is very little dialogue in Dark Souls, and you have no real choices about what you do in the game. There are no books on shelves, like in Skyrim. And yet, the story of Lordran is so clear. The towering architecture tells a story, as does its disrepair and abandonment. Long before you reach Gwyn in the Kiln of the First Flame, the story of the corruption and fall of the gods is easy to see painted across the world around you.
Unpacking is Environmental Storytelling: The Game. As I mentioned, you never really ‘meet’ your character. She doesn’t have a name or a face. But as you unpack box after box of her stuff, you get to know her. You see interests she had as a child wither away as she gets older, while others flourish. You see what is important enough to keep moving from place to place. And you see what she leaves behind. In those objects and spaces, Unpacking tells a surprisingly lovely coming-of-age story without a word of dialogue. Like Richard McGuire’s excellent graphic novel Here, Unpacking recognizes that we create stories, personality, out of the spaces that we see, and uses that to tell a bigger story than its simple conceit should allow.
“Barely managed to fit myself in here!”
High Fidelity was one of my favorite films for many years. It perfectly captures the mindset of a certain kind of snobbery in a way nothing else does. One of the film’s most memorable quotes is:
What really matters is what you like, not what you are like. Books, records, films – these things matter.
When I was younger, I agreed wholeheartedly. I couldn’t imagine dating someone — hell, being friends with someone! — who didn’t share my interests. I was insufferable. I got older. As I did, I came to think: Fuck Rob. Fuck that quote. What you are like matters. I’d rather my friends and lovers be decent people than simply share my hobbies. I got married, and to someone who doesn’t share most of my hobbies. I made friends I like being around, rather than simply the ones who kept up with comic books or whatever.
But now, playing Unpacking, I realize that there really is something to that idea. The things you have do say something about you. They are a map, of what you hold on to and what you let go. You can learn a lot about a person by looking at how they think about their space. Part of the brilliance of Unpacking is that it uses that mental trick we all do to tell a moving story about growing up. And it does so in one of the most satisfyingly relaxing games I’ve ever played.