Unpacking is an indie game from Witch Beam that released in 2021, and it does something I didn’t think a game could actually pull off. It takes the boring chore of unpacking moving boxes and turns it into the entire story of someone’s life. There’s no dialogue and no characters on screen, just boxes, rooms, and the stuff a person carries with them from one place to the next. I went in expecting a relaxing little puzzle game and came out thinking about it a lot more than I planned to.
Unpacking Gameplay
The setup is simple. You get boxes full of objects, and your job is to take everything out and put it where it belongs in the room. That’s it. Across the game’s eight levels you do this over and over, in a new home each time. What keeps it from getting repetitive is that the game never tells you what something is or where it should go. You have to look at an item and figure it out yourself, and I had more trouble with that than I’d like to admit. I’d be sitting there holding some object with no clue where it was supposed to live, moving it around the room until the game finally accepted it. That sounds frustrating, but it’s the part that makes you slow down and actually pay attention.
Unpacking Story
The real reason to play Unpacking is the story, and the clever part is that it’s told entirely through the things you unbox. Each level is a different year in the same woman’s life. You start as a kid moving into a new house, then it’s a dorm room, then a place shared with a partner, and it keeps going from there. The boxes tell you what’s changed since the last move without a single line of text spelling it out. A diary in one place, a toothbrush sitting in someone else’s bathroom in another, and you start piecing together what her life looks like now. Where you put things matters too. How something gets hung on the wall or tucked into a drawer ends up being part of the story. I won’t spoil any of it, but there’s one move in particular where the objects quietly tell you something has gone wrong, and it landed harder than I expected from a game about putting plates away.
Unpacking Music and Sound
The sound design does a lot of quiet work here. Little ambient touches like rain outside or the hum of a fridge make each apartment feel lived in. The soundtrack stays low-key and never gets in the way, which fits a game that’s mostly about sitting in a room and arranging things. It’s the kind of audio you don’t really notice while you’re playing, then realize afterward was setting the whole mood the entire time.
Is Unpacking Worth Playing?
Unpacking asks for patience, and I’ll be honest, I don’t always have a lot of it. With this one I did. The slow pace and the lack of anything resembling traditional gameplay will turn some people off, and that’s fair, this isn’t a game where much happens in the usual sense. But if you settle into it, you get a short, thoughtful experience that tells a complete story without ever explaining itself out loud. I came away really liking it, and it’s stuck with me longer than plenty of bigger games have.
