Unpacking

Developer: Witch Beam
Publisher: Humble Games
Year: 2021
Genre: Adventure
System: Windows

isometric view of a dorm room with a desktop pc

I think at this point everyone has heard of this one. It’s a game released in 2021 where a story is told through a series of relaxing puzzles where you unpack boxes in a new home and need to fit all your stuff in each room. This is one of those games that had been sitting in my backlog for a while despite it being relatively short. I think everything about this game has been covered by folks smarter than me but I did enjoy it. It’s one of those things where there had been so much universal praise for it for years that when I finally got around to it, my first thought was “well yeah it’s good but that’s it?” It’s not fair to the game but it’s so simple and straightforward that I had expected there to be more to it when I finally played it. In fact, if I did have an actual criticism of it, it’s that I had felt like I had “got it” after I played just a few levels. I remember people complaining it was too short at the time but I think it would have become a slog if it was longer.

Anyway, glad I played it. Sometimes you like a thing and think it’s very good, just not as much as everyone else. Like everyone says, it’s a good time and the pixel art is fantastic. Something I didn’t expect would be that my 5 year old would see me playing it, ask to try it out, and fall completely in love with it. She now says it’s one of her favorite games.

It was fun looking up the studio and seeing that they had made Assault Android Cactus+, which I think is brilliant and deserves to be just as popular as Unpacking. It looks like they have one game I haven’t played yet, Tempopo, which was released earlier this year. I’ll have to check that one out too given that I’m a fan of their other work.

Unpacking is available on basically every platform.

Well, Never Mind on RetroAchievements Then

About a month and a half ago I made a post about how I just learned about RetroAchievements and how it was a fun thing to use when revisiting old games. Well, hmmmm, I’m now deleting my account. It has just been discovered by folks that the site has a bit of a Nazi problem, which kills any interest I had in using the site so I put in my account deletion request, which apparently takes them two weeks to process. The quote retweets list other examples of the site’s moderation team not really caring about what users do. They can say as many times as they want that they’re neutral and just care about preservation but folks, they’re adding achievements to video games and that’s it. They can do whatever they want. You don’t need to add achievements to a far right rom hack.

Oh well, one less account for me to think about I guess and I can go back to not using RetroArch.

EDIT: They’ve since put out an apology and stated the right right rom hack won’t be added to the site which is good. I’m still probably going to let my account delete itself because I don’t really need to keep doing achievements for old games anyway, but I’ve got two weeks to think about it and see if they do anything else I guess.