Unpacking is a casual game where you unpack boxes and put items from them into rooms in houses. It is a very basic puzzle game, insofar that you have to put the items in logical places and make sure they all fit in there, but the game is pretty much trivial in terms of difficulty – if you complete unpacking a house and have items in the wrong places, the game will tell you which items are in the wrong places, and you can easily just move them around and put them in the right places. You start out with one room, but some of the later levels have far more than that, with the final level being an entire, full-sized house.
The game is very simplistic, and almost all of the satisfaction you’ll get out of it is from this act of unpacking the boxes and seeing what the person has with them at this chapter in their life.
The game uses environmental storytelling to tell a story, about a child who grows up to be an adult and starts their own life. Each chapter in the game represents a significant change in their life, and as you go through, you learn the person’s interests, as well as see what they’re going through at that point in their life.
It’s fairly cute, and well-done, but it isn’t really enough if you aren’t into the core gameplay of unpacking and arranging things – and honestly, it’s not that interesting of a core mechanic, as it is very simplistic and it is mostly just kind of mindless and a little bit tedious.
Fortunately, the game is quite short (less than 5 hours long to 100%), so you won’t be stuck playing it for overly long.
All in all, it’s hard to recommend this game; it is kind of mediocre, and the clever environmental storytelling isn’t worth unpacking all eight levels of the game.
1.5