Let’s Unpack That
A screenshot of Unpacking (image courtesy of Witch Beam).
I still have unpacking to do. This is my nineteenth house move in my 30 years on the planet, so it’s a familiar routine. I am usually an advocate of the immediate unpack method. On holiday or work trips the first thing I do in a hotel room is take everything out of my bag and put it in place, creating an instant sense of belonging and a temporary home. But my most recent move – back to a city I love, but in a time of what historian Adam Tooze has dubbed “polycrisis” –[1] is complicated. Instead of tackling those last few boxes, I’d rather curl up and play Unpacking (2021) on my Nintendo Switch.
Simple and soothing, Unpacking is a video game from Brisbane-based indie developer Witch Beam that fits environmental storytelling into a satisfying, chilled-out puzzle. As a player you inhabit the life of an unseen main character, meeting them at eight moments of unpacking a new home. These threshold moments are played as un-timed, freeform levels, starting with a childhood bedroom before expanding out to multi-room sets, each filled with cardboard boxes. The point, click and drag gameplay mechanism is immediately graspable with no need for complicated multi-button combos. Don’t just take my word for it that the storytelling is good; Unpacking won the BAFTA for Narrative at the 2022 BAFTA Game Awards, along with the public vote for Game of the Year.
Completing a level is achieved once all items are out of their boxes and set up in a generally correct location. The game will gently alert you if something is out of place by highlighting it in red, but messing around with silly placements will earn you achievements in the form of virtual stickers. Putting the toaster in the bathtub earns you a cute electrocuted skeleton collectible, the kind of nihilistic meme-ish comedy that adds some black humour to an otherwise fairly saccharine game in which plushies are a recurring motif. There’s also a delightful queering to this game of life, where the protagonist’s identity as a bisexual woman is slowly revealed. “In later stages of the game, we unpack more objects loaded with meaning,” writes reviewer Christina Sylvester in i-D magazine. “Queer signifiers or indications of exploring a nascent sexuality – everything from plaid shirts to a favourite mug bearing the colours of the bisexual flag.” As a queer woman, there is joy in seeing yourself reflected in the media you consume. The signifiers of the items queer people surround themselves with often contain messages for other community members; my Switch, for example, is covered in iridescent stickers from the LGBTQ+ site Autostraddle’s fundraising drives. Unpacking’s queerness was always a part of its creative director Wren Brier’s vision. “This is a very personal game and [bisexuality] is a part of my life,” she says in an interview with Eurogamer. “Not including it felt like a weird omission.”
The game’s pixel-art lends a lo-fi, nostalgic appeal[2] to the mundane experience of taking out mis-matched cups and plates and placing them in a less-than-inspiring student kitchen, or stashing pads and tampons under a sink. Unpacking’s charm is underscored by sound design that is instantly calming from the opening credits, where the game’s logo is written out in a just-the-right-side-of-squeaky sharpie pen – like labelling the side of a moving box. Props to the foley team,[3] who provide ASMR levels of satisfaction with the repetitive scrunch of mystery items being removed from brown paper wrapping. Items shift subtly as you arrange them, books slotting into neat rows on a shelf or clothes folding on top of each other. The game plays with this expectation: in one new-home epoch the main character moves in with a Bad Boyfriend who hasn’t made any space for her on his shelves, leaving you to awkwardly shift things about to try and squeeze into someone else’s story.
Unpacking is a cosy game. There is no conflict or jump scares, no skills to level up on. It’s comforting to the part of the psyche that enjoys categorisation and order. It’s a digital doll’s house, with a story as a further doll’s house inside that doll’s house – threads of a life unravelling like a gentle mystery. There’s no crime to solve, but you do find the fingerprints of a life with its passions and triumphs told in ephemera. In a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything), Brier revealed the game was inspired by her moving in with Tim Dawson, Unpacking’s technical director, Witch Beam co-founder, and her life partner. “We were unpacking his stuff and there was something game-like about the process,” writes Brier. “I was looking around the house as we were unpacking and thinking how much you could tell about Tim and me from the items in our home.” In their Eurogamer interview, the pair add that the inspiration behind the format was ‘The Bed Song’ from Amanda Palmer & The Grand Theft Orchestra’s album Theatre is Evil. The seven-minute-long song narrates the story of a romantic relationship through shared sleeping spaces, each vignette labelled Exhibit A through to E, like evidence held up in court. Do you ever wonder what a stranger would make of your life right now if they rifled through your bedroom with a detective’s eye? Unpacking offers the same slightly voyeuristic thrill, except you are the stranger. Although, by the end of the game, you feel like a friend.
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Cosy gaming has come into its own as a genre. At first I thought it was confined to my hyperspecific TikTok algorithm,[4] which has the uncanny ability to preempt my interests thanks to my dedicated training of it. My For You page is full of cosy game reviews and adorably aesthetic gaming set-ups. But the genre is definitely out there on the internet proper too, from SEO-friendly roundups that offer ‘8 Cosy Games to Play While the World is Falling Apart’ to headlines encouraging us to ‘Prepare for Cosy Gaming Season’. Cosy gaming is for life, of course, not just for one season, but my desire for games designed to offer peaceful enjoyment over prowess in battle or survival in a hostile environment filled with enemies is shared by many.
“I’ve always been a cosy gamer,” says Sian Fan, an interdisciplinary artist who uses video game technology as a medium. “Even as a kid I gravitated towards less stressful experiences. I love being able to immerse myself in fantasy worlds; I like exploring and collecting.” Fan’s work combines her background in performance with technology, blending live action and digital in pieces that draw heavily on the fantastical and nostalgic worlds of media familiar to many 90s kids: Pokémon, Final Fantasy, Sailor Moon. Her pieces are meditations on the natural world, magical girls, and her mixed British-Asian identity. But as an artist who works with games every day, gaming in her downtime has become a bit of a busman’s holiday. “I actually much prefer watching other people play games than playing them myself,” says Fan. “I still love getting lost in the world of games, so I make my partner play them.”
Cosy games are “about relaxation, not competition,” says Paola Antonelli, senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. While a cosy game can transport you to a fantastical landscape, there is also “a cocooning effect, making your world smaller and safer.” It’s something that Antonelli looks for in her own gaming experience. “I’m a very competitive person so I never get into competitive games, because I don’t want to be stressed out,” she says. “I have enough stress in my life, thank you very much.” Along with MoMA collection specialist Paul Galloway, Antonelli has co-curated the new exhibition, Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design (2022), which displays many of the 36 games painstakingly acquired and preserved by MoMA over the past decade. Interestingly, none of these games are those “where the violence is amoral or immoral”. So, a niche title such as This War of Mine (2014) from indie Polish developer 11 Bit Studio, a survival simulator where you experience the horrors of war from a civilian’s perspective, is in MoMA’s archive, but none of publishing titan Rockstar Games’s wildly popular Grand Theft Auto series has made it in. “Ideas of morality might change in the future,” says Antonelli. “I’m not sure that shooting up pimps and prostitutes will ever become morally acceptable behaviour.”
I have no such qualms about my personal gaming archive, but this conversation did make me think about the ways in which I play games, even violent ones. I’ve never played quite how the game wants me to. My gaming journey started out when I was still in single digits. My parents were usually exceptionally careful about age-appropriate media – I still dream of the hallucinogenic quality of the salad-making factory minigame from the nutrition-themed game 5 A Day Adventures (1995) – but I was somehow given an unvetted copy of Nine Month Miracle (1995). While I certainly enjoyed all the information about human reproduction, the adults in my life where less thrilled when they discovered I was using its live birth footage as a DIY sex education tool for friends who were less knowledgable about the facts of life. The CD-ROM was mysteriously lost, but I was happy to move along to teaching myself basic hex coding to customise my own content for Petz 4 (1999) and the original and best cosy game, The Sims (2000). At first, games where I was given a gun were too scary. I loved zapping my enemies with Tesla coils or running them over with tanks in Red Alert 2 (2000), but Tomb Raider (1996) would have me screaming and dumping the controller when a rogue pixelated lion or gorilla attacked me. I had Grand Theft Auto III (2001), but I would rather tip the sex workers and visit them for healthbar restoration than murder them. But by the time my father had networked our two home PCs so my brother and I could take turns playing Ghost Recon 2 (2004), I knew I had to beat them and join them. So I would play the field medic, dashing to resuscitate my fallen comrades with my handy defibrillator.
Playing games against the grain they were designed for is also a form of cosy gaming. Content creator Navami is a queer Tamil gamer who flies the flag for femmes taking up space in games traditionally dominated by gamer bros (derogatory). Under the TikTok handle @pinkjujitsu, they illustrate how games such as God of War: Ragnarök (2022), The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015), and Elden Ring (2022) are, in fact, cosy games perfectly suited for “glossy girly gamers”. God of War? More like God of Cosiness. “It’s so cottagecore,”[5] they say of a game that, at least nominally, sends you into bloody battle against the Norse pantheon, pointing out God of War’s shelves of trinkets and animated butterflies swirling around glowing mushrooms. Think The Witcher 3 is about fighting eldritch monsters? It’s actually a dressup/dating sim where you can “dress [protagonist] Geralt in goth chic armour, make his swords glow pink and have him romance a pretty sorceress”. “I’m not being dramatic when I say that I would rather sit naked on a hot grill,” reads one of Navami’s captions, “than play a game in hard mode when there’s a story mode.” Many of their videos are a direct troll of the archetypal gamer: men determined to play to win and validate their toxic masculinity with gamified conquest.
However hard certain elements of a game’s fanbase may insist it is dark and gritty, popular game mechanics present in most big-name games have cosy elements: you can customise your appearance and collect a wardrobe of fashion options; gather flowers, mushrooms and sparkly rocks to make potions; ride a pretty horse around a world filled with beautiful scenery. Despite its reputation for difficult combat and gruesome deaths, for example, Elden Ring has been embraced by many of its players as a cute horse-riding sim that recalls the nostalgia of the popular games of our girlhoods. “In Barbie Horse Adventures: Riding Camp, you can take your horse on trails and get rewarded for collecting stars,” Jenny Zheng writes for Fanbyte in ‘Elden Ring is a Horse Girl Game, Actually’. “I’ve substituted collecting sparkly stars for collecting the heads of enemies. It’s basically the same thing.”
This isn’t a new phenomenon. “There’s a subversive element to it,” says writer and video game consultant Alex Wiltshire. “Ten or fifteen years ago, shooters were the de facto main genre, but then you started to see people not playing them in the intended way.” Players would use screenshots to take beautiful photos while exploring landscapes to share with fellow fans online, and began using games with online multiplayer designs as a place to socialise and hang out virtually. Customisation options allowed for a riot of creativity. “Even [in] Counter-Strike (2000), the default, emblematic hyper-competitive game where you can buy and sell beautiful gun skins,[6] there’s an animation where you can show other players your gun,” Wiltshire says. “[You’d see all] these pink guns with anime characters down the side.” Wiltshire observes that many violent games feature a cosy domestic element, no matter how dark the world-building. “Monster Hunter is a super hardcore game about smashing up monsters with swords,” he says. “But you have a house where, at the end of every hunt in the old games, you would save by going to bed.” In a Proustian moment, I recall the joy of getting my own house in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), secured in between calling down death-dealing dragons from the sky. “It was the moment that games stopped being purely a place where you did what the game told you and became a place you could go,” Wiltshire explains. “As soon as games become a place, people want to start making them homes.” Unpacking, I realise, has been tapping into this universal urge to nest.
But beware simply labelling cosy games such as Unpacking as “wholesome”, warns curator and video game expert Marie Foulston. “A lot of LGBTQ+ communities and people of marginalised genders take issue with the word,” she says. As cosy gaming establishes its niche, there’s the risk that by defining these games by their cuteness and lack of combat, you flatten any conflict or knottiness that could be unpacked from the narrative – particularly when they are built around the lesser-told stories of marginalised identities. “People felt that branding this genre as ‘wholesome’ was denying the complexity and nuance of some of the games,” explains Foulston. “It’s potentially denying the ability to look at the politics that are within these works,” she adds. “You can have violence, you can have competitiveness and still be radically different from what we consider mainstream games.” Queer stories come under extra scrutiny for dark themes, but by embracing a veneer of uncomplicated wholesomeness we risk playing the losing game of respectability politics.
Because while Unpacking is charming, it’s also tinged with sadness for some players. “I had a really strong reaction to this game,” admits Foulston. “I loved the fact that it built in all these subtle cues that it’s a queer relationship. [But] I’m a woman in her 30s who is single and has not had a relationship trajectory that has gone up, my income has not been on an upward trajectory, I do not feel my career trajectory has gone upwards.” While the Unpacking protagonist does boomerang back to the family home at one point, they ultimately build towards a happily coupled home-owning life with a spouse. For uncoupled millennials like me and Foulston, playing the game from sub-par rentals that take a too-large chunk of our arts career salaries, Unpacking’s narrative arc feels crushingly unobtainable. “You suddenly realise that she’s got into a relationship, her career has gone in the right direction, she’s moved into a bigger house,” says Foulston. “It was this moment playing the game where I just felt really fucking sad. I felt like a failure.” Foulston, it should be noted, was the curator of Videogames: Design/ Play/Disrupt (2018) at the Victoria & Albert Museum, a defining moment in gaming’s entry into mainstream design discourse, as well as the co-founder of indie game collective The Wild Rumpus. So, hardly a slacker by any standard, but society’s narrow, heteronormative and capitalist definition of success often comes down to shared asset ownership.
In a way, Unpacking’s milestone-based format is unrecognisable to younger generations. For Millennials, our adult years have been one long rolling series of economic and housing and climate crises that make any kind of linear progression through life seem laughable. I realise that, perhaps, I have been self-soothing with the game. “Cosy games are messes that you go in and clear up – Unpacking is the epitome of that,” says Foulston. “You’re restoring order.” I’ve found the game to be the mental equivalent of snuggling under a warm blanket on a rainy dark evening. I would like to have an actual warm blanket, but all the electric ones I want are sold out online because everyone else has already stocked up on them, too scared to put the heating on, and our friable supply chains mean that I have no idea when I’ll be able to get hold of one. I should probably tackle those last few boxes of my possessions, but I think I’ll play Unpacking through just one more time.
1 “Polycrisis” is a Greek word brought into modern parlance by former president of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker in 2016; Tooze defines its current application thusly: “Polycrisis is not just a situation where you face multiple crises. It is a situation like that mapped in the risk matrix, where the whole is even more dangerous than the sum of the parts.” Thanks. I hate it.
2 Although, a recent TikTok video vomited up by the algorithm educated me that original pixel art was designed to look rounded and higher resolution on old screens. As such, the high-contrast blocky art style popularised today, while valid in its own right, is actually a nostalgia for a past that modern high-resolution screens mean we can never return to. It’s a digital hiraeth.
3 Jeff van Dyck, Witch Beam’s sound designer, recorded 14,000 foley sounds of various objects being put down on different surfaces for Unpacking.
4 See ‘Enter the Washing Machine’ (p.66) in this issue for a full discussion of the TikTok algorithm as an interface.
5 Another nice meta-cosy detail about Unpacking is that part of its development process was undertaken at Stugan, a nonprofit games accelerator held in a cabin in the middle of the woods in Sweden. Deeply cottagecore.
6 For any gaming n00bs, a skin is a purely aesthetic modification that you can download to change the appearance of a character or an object in a video game.
Words India Block
Photography courtesy of Witch Beam
This article was originally published in Design Reviewed #1. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.