Unpacking "Unpacking"
Disclaimer: This article will contain story spoilers for the game Unpacking.
The “zen puzzle game” Unpacking has been getting well-deserved attention in the gaming community recently for its representation of queer relationships and its ability to turn the chore of unpacking a series of homes into a relaxing and satisfying experience while working in an intricate story about the life of the main character, who the player never gets to meet. The game is available on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PC through Steam, and was developed by Australian indie game development studio Witch Beam. The game starts in 1997, where the player helps the main character unpack her new bedroom in her childhood home by taking items out of boxes and deciding where to put them in the empty room. When everything is out of the boxes, the game lets the player know if any objects are in an inappropriate place by outlining them in red, and the next level only unlocks once everything is in a reasonable spot.
Throughout most of the game, this feature is just used to keep the player from throwing clothes around the room and putting too many things on floors and near sinks, but in two notable cases this feature is used to tell an important piece of the story. In September 2010, the main character moves in with a boyfriend who has no wall space for her to display her degree, and the game actually forces the player to store the framed degree under the bed. The boyfriend’s apartment also has a very dark and uncluttered aesthetic, which clashes with the main character’s more colorful and maximalist aesthetic and makes her personal items look out of place once the rooms are fully unpacked. The next time the object placement alarm feature is used for the story is in the very next level, when the main character moves back into her room in her parent’s house from the first level and keeps a picture of herself and the boyfriend. If the player tries to put this picture up on the wall, a red pushpin is stuck directly into the face of the boyfriend. When everything is unpacked, the game forces the player to hide the picture away in a cabinet or drawer.
The game also rewards completionist players who enjoy interacting with as many objects as possible by giving them secret stickers for doing things like flushing every single toilet throughout the game or solving the Rubik’s cube that shows up in later levels. The player also receives a sticker for finishing each level, like a rainbow d20 (a 20-sided die) that represents the character’s interest in playing dungeons and dragons that remains a theme from the third chapter on. One of the stickers, a coffee cup that is rewarded to the player for pulling all of the boyfriend’s coffee-making tools out and putting them on the kitchen counter when moving in with him, signals a love for specialized homemade coffee that the main character carries with her even after breaking up with her boyfriend.
The queer stories depicted in popular media tend to focus either on the suffering of queer characters or a traumatic coming out, both of which do not accurately represent the journey that a queer person goes through as they enter adulthood and learn how they want to express their queerness. Unpacking takes players through the mundane but heartwarming parts of a queer person’s life, without making it so subtle that it can be ignored. The first time the player encounters the main character’s queerness is when she needs to unpack a pair of rainbow socks after moving into an apartment with a lot of extra space in January 2013. In the next chapter in November 2015, another woman moves in and, notably, sets up in the same bed as our main character. If the player misses this detail in this chapter, the final level in July 2018 shows the main character moving in with this partner and setting up a nursery, and the final credits make it undeniable that the main character is in a queer relationship with another woman. Rather than showing the character having an emotional coming out or being kicked out by her parents for her sexuality, Unpacking focuses on working in queerness into the character’s life as just one aspect of her personality among being an artist, enjoying dungeons and dragons, and playing video games on consoles like the GameCube and the Wii.
Unpacking is the kind of game that can be played over and over again, and still be entertaining and detailed enough to be engaging every time. While the story is important and the kind of queer representation portrayed in it is refreshingly ordinary, the primary mechanic of taking things out of boxes and putting them away provides the player a calm and almost mindless experience that allows them to choose the level of engagement in the story they wish to have. The game is only $19.99 on Steam, the Nintendo Store, and Xbox, and for anyone who chooses to play through it, I highly recommend checking out the replay feature at the end of each level to watch your own unpacking process and enjoy the details put into the sound design for each object on every surface!
You can check out the game for yourself at https://www.unpackinggame.com/
