Hello! I’m one of the developers who made Unpacking, a game about taking someone’s items out of boxes and learning about that person’s life in the process. People often describe the game as feeling very personal, and we think it is, but personal can mean different things.
The items are personal to our main character, and let you learn about her and watch her develop over the course of the game. The items often have a personal connection to you, the player, as you encounter things that remind you of your own life or those people you know. And the items are personal to us, the developers, because part of making this game involved drawing on our own experiences and finding ways to add small details where we could.
Alarm Clock
The fun thing about this alarm clock is it’s blank until you find a valid place for it, then it’ll flash “12:00”. If you interact with the clock, you can set the time, which is the time in the stage—you’ll see it change along with the lighting outside the window as you unpack the remaining boxes.
If you move the clock again, the display goes blank, then goes back to blinking “12:00” when you set it down. Alarm clocks like this often use a battery backup so they don’t lose the time during short power outages, but I had one when I was younger and forgot to put a battery in it, so it behaved just like the one in game. Realism!
Dragon Plush Toy
When I was seventeen, I thought it would be a good idea to start a webcomic about a bunch of young dragons living in a forest. It ran for over five years and two thousand comic strips. While it never got particularly popular and it’s not online anymore, the characters remain near and dear to my heart, so it meant a lot that one of the main characters makes a cameo in Unpacking in plush toy form!
Colour Pencils
This set of colour pencils in a tin tray arrives alongside other art supplies, books and evidence of the protagonist’s blossoming pursuit of the visual arts, but for me they’re a reminder of a set of similar colour pencils I received when I was a kid.
I don’t remember exactly what age I was when I got them, I just remember they were my treasure and were labeled with something like “professional artist pencils” or something s