Unpacking in real life: how I handled the stress of managing physical spaces

gamepur.com:

I’m told that the idea of constantly moving between places is a very “American” concept. Whereas my family in the Philippines is accustomed to staying in the same family home for generations, I’ve been moving from one new space to another — twice in the past year, in fact. It is a stressful ordeal every time, but around the time of my most recent move, I happened to be playing Unpacking from developer Witch Beam. What resulted from playing the puzzle game was an enlightening recontextualization of how interacting with my personal physical space affects my mental space — and I loosened my anxiety over building a complete, “perfect” home.

You’d think that we’d want to escape reality through video games, but what Unpacking provided was some catharsis and perspective. There are some obvious reasons why moving is such a trying experience: finding a new space, the logistics of packing, the monetary cost of transport, and the manual labor that comes after. But in Unpacking, those steps are already completed. All the player needs to do is to take objects out of cardboard boxes and organize them into your character’s new space. What Unpacking brings to light is how tolling that final step is, even compared to the ones that come before it.

Related: Where to put every item in 1997 – Unpacking item placement guide

Unpacking presents isometric pixel art displays of rooms, with each level of the game depicting a specific year and stage of your character’s life. Using the cursor, you’ll open boxes and pull items out one by one, and your task is to place them all in a “correct” spot — the game won’t progress to the next level until everything is generally where it should be. It might seem limiting at first, but it leads to some