It's been seven or eight years since my family moved to their current house. The room, which was still somewhat empty at the time, has become a little crowded. However, in terms of layout, the layout of the home is no different from the original, and overall it is still very tidy, and there is nothing messed up.
The family doesn't like to put too many things outside, especially those small pieces of trinkets, especially in the living room. Seeing me place two toys on the TV stand or at the dinner table, I was sure to show a complicated expression, squeeze my brow like a Gundam antenna, and let me quickly take it back. I began to argue a little, and after a long time, I did not say more, but silently put the gadgets in my room and did not take them out again.
I enjoyed setting up the room and filling the space of the whole room with all sorts of little things. My own room was almost a world apart from the other rooms in my house. Looking up slightly, the walls of cabinets are filled with models, toys, and various games and peripherals. After the original move, the newly beaten cabinets were almost full, and the whole room was like a small two-dimensional city, and the plastic people who were somewhat crowded were like soldiers in the castle, making the whole city look quite vibrant.
Your own room is always filled with these little things
I'm probably the only one in the family who thinks this room is very vibrant, and the family just thinks that this room is really messy. One of the most commonly heard words is "pack up," which means to make me put away all these little things that are outside and look neater. I always disagreed, and continued to build new bricks and tiles for the toy city little by little, trying to make this event a little more lively.
It's just that the capacity of this room is always limited, and even if I want to stuff in more toys and periphery, I have to admit that there is really no room left for new guests. I was reluctant to drive away my existing residents, to resell my favorite treasures to others, and not to let them sleep in the box on the top of the closet. Now, I don't like to swing around in the room much, and spending an afternoon to make room for a new toy and two new sets of peripherals is getting farther and farther away from me.
So, when I browse the Steam store as usual and stumble upon Unpacking, I can't help but feel a little excited, as if I had run into the book I had always needed on the vast bookshelf, or saw the sign of the store that suited me in the shopping street of the town. In "Unpacked," I try to regain the feeling of being free in the room.
It may be hard to find a game that is even simpler to operate than Unpack, and even before the game tells me what to do, I have fully understood my next task. Click on the cardboard box on the ground, and the seal on it will be opened. Click again, and you'll have a small object in your hand—maybe a book, a ruler, a small dinosaur toy, or an eraser. The only thing I had to do was to put the pieces of luggage in the right place in the house.
It all started with an empty room and a few sealed cardboard boxes
The process of putting things is quite free, in principle, as long as there is enough space, then I want to put such things wherever I want, I can put them wherever they are. For example, if I put a book on a bookshelf or on my bed, I can sneak to the bottom of a cabinet and lock the knowledge and memories in the corner of the room. However, the habit of cleaning up the house all day long, coupled with so many years of common sense of life, what should be put where is still a bit of a number in mind. Put all the stationery in the desk drawer, don't forget the diary, then put the small toys into the small grid of the cabinet next to it, and change the layout with a small pot of green plants.
It's not just about placement, "Unpacking" has a story. The first scene is set in 1997. Although there is no hint in the game, the little owner of the room does not show his face, looking at the countless plush toys and huge school bags in the room, you can more or less understand that this room belongs to a cute little girl. After helping her clean up the whole house, with a click, the whole room condensed into a small photo, sandwiched in the album belonging to the page belonging to 1997. "I finally have my own room!" At the bottom of the photo is written this line of small print.
I longed to have a little dinosaur living in bed
I try to recall the joy I had when I had just had an empty room. I don't remember when I started owning my own room before moving. At that time, there was no hobby of collecting, there were no small objects that could be placed in the room, and there was no need for display cases and shelves. After high school, I started playing with models, and the piles of toys and boxes were nowhere to be stacked, and finally I began to worry about when I could have a decent display case in my room so that the toys could have a spacious space.
I went home and flipped through the photo album and found that the first photo I left behind after the move was the newly purchased display case in the room. At that time, the cabinet was still very empty, and I could directly see the bare white back plate behind it. At that time, my heart was filled with infinite expectations for the future, hoping that one day I would fill the cabinets with more and more toys, so that every day in the room would be as happy as an amusement park. Halfway through my dream, the display cases are now packed, the dolls and the surroundings are crowded together like subway cars, but the days are not as happy as the amusement park.
This group of cabinets has also been empty
Still, I miss that feeling, the same vision of the future and the most innocent joy that I had with the protagonist of 1997.
In 2007, the protagonist of "Unpack the Luggage" went to college, left home with his luggage, and came to his own new world. The desk in the bedroom has its own paintbrush and pen tablet, and the living room wall hangs posters of favorite game characters and bands. In addition to robot models in the cabinet, there are also many more game consoles and board games. "Movie night must have been great!" She wrote in the album. She and her friends are not seen in the game, and there is not a single voice. Just by looking at the layout of the room, it seems that she and her friends gathered in the living room laughing and laughing, watching the movie, eating snacks and chatting.
The living room also features Sailor Moon's Cosplay costumes
I still have some envy for this protagonist. In "Unpack the Bags," I happily set up my college dorm room, but in fact I was almost desperate on my first day of college. The school's dormitories are bunk beds, each person does not have their own desk, only a long strip of table that will be enough for the 6 people in the dormitory to sit down. In such an embarrassing environment, the space in the dormitory is almost nothing to be arranged, just put some daily necessities and books, which has made the whole dormitory as crowded as a submarine.
It wasn't until I went to study in Japan and stayed in a private room in a student apartment that I really had a cabin of my own—a hut that was completely at my disposal and organized according to my own wishes. The area of the single room is not large, only more than ten square meters, and there are not many places where peripherals and toys can be placed. Put a few monster and hero dolls, put on a few boxes of games, and there is almost no space in the display case on the desk.
The apartment room was small, but it was a pleasure to stay there
Still, I'm so happy that I finally had the opportunity to show everything in my own space. When a friend comes as a guest, you can take the handle together and come to two rounds of "big brawl" together, and you don't have to worry about other things, because this is the space that really belongs to me. Although due to access restrictions, it was impossible to hold a "movie night" like in "Unpacked", I still cherished that time.
"Moving to his house, that's a big step!" In September 2010, the protagonist left his apartment alone and came to "his" home. His house was cool, with his electric guitar hanging on the living room wall and stacks of CDs from his collection underneath. The record player next to the sofa is playing a melody that both people like.
You can see that music is indispensable in their lives
One by one, I placed the objects that followed the protagonist all the way to my boyfriend's house, and watching the past of the two people intertwined in the same room, I began to think about a question: If one day I lived in someone else's house like this, what would it be like? What kind of chemistry does something that absorbs my past and memories have in relation to another person's life?
I thought that the protagonist had cleaned up well, and the collection of the two people was placed together, and even gave birth to a kind of harmony, which made people think that this room should be like this. Two stylish and difficult books should be placed on the top of the stereo, and two photos full of memories should be posted on the refrigerator. In this room, the thoughts of 3 people are integrated: first the boyfriend arranges his room according to his own preferences, the protagonist comes with his own things and puts them here, and I, through the game process of poking and poking dots, makes my aesthetic become the catalyst for this reaction.
She would put her beloved Walkman on the bedside table, and he liked to put an ornamental bamboo at the table. The bits and pieces of the two people's living habits loom in the home decoration. The two people in the game are cleaning up their lives, while I find my memories outside the game.
Returning home after graduation, the protagonist looks at his original room and simply says, "This room used to feel bigger." In 2012, after more than 5 years away from home, she was back to her original starting point. Her room has changed, and she has had many new hobbies over the years — sewing machines for Cosplay costumes and laptops for drawing. Her room didn't seem to have changed, and in the cupboard was the cute rainbow puppy poster, and the bed was still her favorite furry piglet.
It was as if everything had changed, and as if nothing had changed
The biggest change would be that their family already had a new member. Look at the group photo on the table, the 4 people in the photo, probably the protagonist's parents, and her and her boyfriend. A new family meant a new life, and soon she and her boyfriend — perhaps already husbands — moved into a new home and began a new phase of life in a large house.
In the next game, it is more important to properly dispose of the kitchen, bathroom and wardrobe than to freely place your favorite toys and ornaments. There are too many pots and pans in the kitchen, and it is difficult to neatly store these necessary tools in the cupboard in a very limited space. It's hard to make room to put everything down, and the game reminds me that some tools are out of place—the bread machine and microwave must be pressed against the wall to be powered on, and the spice bottles can't go beyond the boundaries of the cabinet. It's much harder to clean up your living space than to tidy up your own house.
Kitchens place high demands on players' spatial planning skills
After returning home from college, I also experienced a period of struggling to tidy up the kitchen. Usually do not live at home, gradually no longer familiar with the layout of the home kitchen, so that occasionally when you need to cook your own meals, you can't figure out where the kitchenware and spices are placed. My mother laughed at me: "I don't know where the things in the house are, are you still a member of the family?" "My mother's words made me gag for a while, and if I left home for too long, I would really lose the feeling of living at home.
People have to play different roles at different stages of life, the protagonist is initially just a child who is happy to get a new room, then a college student who decorates the dormitory with a hobby, and in the blink of an eye, she is already a hostess who needs to take care of the family's life. When the baton of family life is finally passed into his own hands, it is difficult to escape this responsibility. Even in the game, we have to carefully consider how to place the kitchen and bathroom utensils, so that life is more convenient, simpler, and happier. "It feels so much more comfortable now! It was like a home at last. In 2015, after moving to a new home, she bought a lot of new homes, and she is very satisfied with her house.
The new home is full of life
But the protagonist does not seem to have forgotten his dreams and hobbies because of the hardships of life. Her study has always been home to her computer, tablet and brush, and the display panels on the walls are always tied with her own character designs. "I'm going to make this my art space!" She seems to have been working her own creation, trying to depict an ideal world in her own mind in a picture book, and the protagonist is the piglet she has always cherished.
All the efforts finally blossomed at the end. In 2018, the two moved into a new, larger home. The protagonist's picture book seems to have finally been published, and there are still several collections in the cabinet of the study. The TV cabinet in the living room was filled with games and movies they had always loved. There is a small room in the villa on the second floor, which is for the child who is about to be born. "We are very much looking forward to getting to know you!" The protagonist's words are full of joy in the expectation of the future.
I chose the last tidying up baby room
The blank space of "Unpacking" gives players endless imagination space. In the game, the protagonist never appears in the picture - except for an illustration after the game, the back of the family can be seen, and we can't see these people at the rest of the time. However, their lives have been shown to us at a glance through the home furnishings in "Unpacked". The trajectory of the protagonist's life along the way does not require many words, and only by virtue of the process of us helping her unpack her, she has already woven a youthful prose poem. Reading this prose poem, I can't help but think of myself, I try to follow the clues of the protagonist's life, look back at my youth.
After playing "Unpack", I picked up the photo album again, looked at the photos of a few years ago, and tried to find some traces of the layout of the home in that year and awaken my memories. Maybe in the future, I will leave my current home and start a new life with my new family in a new house. Maybe in the future, I will also take care of my life while not forgetting to pursue my dreams. I believe that at that time, I will still think of "Unpacking", and I will think of this relaxed little game that evokes my memories.
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