APP STORE AWARDS

Cultural Impact winner: Unpacking

Unpacking

The moving story of a lifetime

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This poignant puzzler not only makes flexing your decorating skills fun – it also reminds you it’s possible to connect deeply with someone you’ve never met.

– App Store editors

You get to know Unpacking’s unseen protagonist in the most unlikely of ways: by helping her find a place for her belongings.

On the first level, you set up her childhood bedroom, placing her boom box on her desk and figuring out the cosiest spot for her stuffed animals. Years later, when she moves into her boyfriend’s apartment, the objects change. Now it’s DVDs, a yoga mat and kitchen supplies. Each move chronicles a new stage of her life.

From basic bedrooms to complicated kitchens, every room needs your organisational eye.

In Unpacking, seeing where everything fits takes emotional intelligence as much as strong spatial skills. After a bit of trial and error, for example, you’ll realise that photo of an ex-boyfriend belongs tucked in a cabinet instead of displayed on a chest of drawers.

Sifting through the protagonist’s belongings over the decades, you see her evolve, shed old identities and embrace her true self. You begin to understand her struggles and successes, as though you’ve known her for years.

Great games have an uncanny way of making you appreciate your real-world relationships – and Unpacking did that for us. It made us realise an act of generosity – helping someone get their stuff in order – can foster the deepest bonds.

Quick tip

If you deliberately put every item in the wrong place on the first level, you’ll unlock a secret Dark Star mode, with distorted music and scrapbook entries suggesting a different type of protagonist. From there, the challenge for the rest of the game becomes putting everything where it doesn’t belong.

Fun fact

In the opening level, set in 1997, you’ll unpack a toy pig that reappears during each move, eventually finding its way to a nursery with a bow around its neck.

Meet the creator

The idea for Unpacking came when Australian game developers Wren Brier and Tim Dawson moved in together. The prototype they developed in their free time would go on to become the second title for indie game studio Witch Beam.