Unpacking Review and How Moving Boxes Tell a Life Story

I keep a notebook of every game I review, and for most of them the notes are about systems: what the loop is, where it breaks, what I would cut. My page for Unpacking is mostly a list of objects. A stuffed toy that always ends up on the bed. A diploma that will not fit on the wall. A set of drawing pens that keeps getting a better desk. I finished it in a little under four hours, and it is the only game this year where I closed the console and immediately wanted to talk to someone about a character who never appears on screen.

That is unusual enough that it deserves an explanation, because on paper Unpacking sounds like a tidying simulator. Plenty of people I recommended it to bounced off the description before trying it. If you have done the same, this review is an argument for giving it the four hours.

What the game asks you to do

Unpacking, made by the small Brisbane studio Witch Beam and released in November 2021, covers eight house moves across one woman's life, starting with her childhood bedroom in 1997 and ending in 2018. Each level is a set of rooms full of closed boxes. You open a box, pull out items one at a time, and place them wherever you like. There is no timer, no score, no fail state.

The one rule: at the end of a level, any item in a clearly wrong place, a toothbrush in the kitchen, a frying pan in the bedroom, gets outlined in red, and the level will not finish until you move it. That is the only judgement the game makes, and it is light enough that I rarely felt corrected.

Everything else is the player inferring. You never see the woman, never read a line of dialogue about her, and almost never see any text at all. You learn who she is entirely through her belongings.

How objects carry the story

The trick that makes Unpacking work is repetition with variation. Certain items follow her from home to home, and you notice them the way you would notice a friend's old mug at their new flat.

The stuffed toy from her childhood room shows up again in the university dorm, still claiming a spot on the pillow. The drawing tools from her early years become, in later homes, part of what looks like an illustration career. You watch her diploma go from a box to a wall.

The level I wrote the most about is the 2010 move into a boyfriend's apartment. His things are already there, and they fill everything. Your drawers are half full of his clothes. There is no hook for her diploma and no wall space, so the game's red outline keeps appearing on items with nowhere they are allowed to go, until you shove the diploma under the bed. Nobody tells you the relationship is unhealthy. The apartment tells you. The next level is a move back into a small room on her own, and I have rarely felt relief in a game the way I felt it unpacking those few boxes.

I made a note at the time that I spent about eight minutes on that apartment, almost all of it trying to find room for her things. I suspect the designers counted on that frustration.

Unpacking never says a word about her boyfriend. It just refuses to give you a place to put her diploma, and that turns out to be enough.

The sound is half the game

Witch Beam has said it recorded a huge library of sound effects for the game, widely reported as more than 14,000. That figure sounded like marketing until I played with headphones. Every object makes the right sound for the surface you put it on. A plate on a wooden shelf is different from a plate on tile, and a soft toy landing on a bed makes a satisfying, muffled pat. Jeff van Dyck's soundtrack stays gentle and gets out of the way.

This matters more than it might seem, because the game asks for a lot of small repeated actions. Without the sound design, I think the middle levels would drag. With it, the act of placing things stays pleasant even in the larger houses.

What critics overstate

A lot of reviews call Unpacking "relaxing". I would push back slightly. It is calm, but not always relaxing, and the stretches that hit hardest are the ones that are not relaxing at all. The boyfriend apartment is quietly stressful. A later level, where your belongings mix with someone else's in a way that does work, has its own tension around which items you keep visible. If you go in expecting a pure wind-down game, you might be caught off guard.

The other common complaint, that it is too short for its price, I understand but do not share. I paid about the price of two cinema tickets. My partner played it after me and we spent a long dinner comparing where we put things and what we thought had happened between moves. I would take four dense hours over a thirty hour game that repeats itself, and I have written before about building a backlog you will actually play, where short games like this are exactly what I recommend.

My real criticisms are smaller. The last two levels are large and slow down, partly because the houses have more rooms and partly because the story is resolving rather than developing. A couple of the red-outline rules felt arbitrary to me, such as an item I thought belonged in a study counting as wrong. And there is almost no replay value once you know the story, apart from photo mode.

Who it is for

If you liked the quiet storytelling in Spiritfarer, or you enjoy games that trust you to piece things together yourself, Unpacking is an easy recommendation. It is also one of the few games I have successfully handed to people who do not play games, because the controls amount to picking something up and putting it down.

If you need challenge, progression, or explicit narrative, this is not for you, and no amount of praise for its craft will change that.

The verdict

Play it in two sittings rather than one, ideally with a break after the 2010 level, so the move that follows lands properly. Before you start, keep a short list as you go of the three objects you notice travelling with her the longest, and check at the end whether you were right about why. That small exercise turns a pleasant game into a memorable one. More of our verdicts on short, story-led games are in the reviews section.