It’s weird how coming back to your hometown can make you feel two inches tall. I moved out of my parent’s house years ago, got a job, a husband, some fur babies and hit the milestones typically associated with adulthood. But the entire time I’ve lived within spitting distance of my hometown: Portsmouth, Virginia. I can’t go anywhere without seeing ghosts; I walk by the stores where I got my high school wardrobe, the theaters my friends and I frequented, the mall — the nice one, not the lame one where we always hung out — that we’d beg our parents to drop us off at. Those memories relentlessly tear me down until I’m a kid again at 29.
Moving only puts that smallness into stark relief. Come the new year, I’ll be halfway across the country. Everything I own is being sized up and pared down until it’s tiny enough to fit into a few boxes and a truck. There’s a subtle satisfaction to be found in the Tetris-like challenge of putting everything neatly away, only to reverse the process in an entirely new space. That’s the idea behind “Unpacking" from developer Witch Beam. Described as a Zen puzzle game, it turns moving into a series of problems to be solved. How do you find the right home for every item amid boxes and boxes of stuff? All the while, you discover more about the life you’re unpacking through some truly first-rate environmental storytelling. The character catalogues each move in a photo album, which functions as the level select screen, along with a short caption — they’re the only lines of dialogue in the entire game.
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