These were organised in character profiles. That meant those objects needed to reflect certain characteristics - sometimes specific to that character, other times just practical items. It's not just storytelling but characterisation that's done through simple objects. And then from that we get this story element of: 'he didn't make space for you'. "We needed to tutorialise the fact that you can move the boyfriend's items around, how do we do that? Oh, we make his items take up as much space as possible. "It accentuated the boyfriend's lousiness," Brier adds. "The game mechanic where we wanted you to be able to understand that you had to move items around ended up becoming a narrative beat, because by emphasising that it made the player feel like they were having to intrude or having to make space for themselves," says Dawson. One example is the boyfriend's apartment level where you must unpack the protagonist's belongings around those of her new boyfriend. Sometimes it was the game's mechanics which informed the story, too. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. "Rather than sitting down and writing a story and saying 'ok, which items tell that story', we're thinking of items and thinking of a story that item will tell, and sometimes we're thinking of a story and that invents items. "You can learn a lot from snapshots, you can fill in the blanks," says Dawson. And I was like, what if we did something like that but with the moves in someone's life?"īut how do you tell a story through objects? "And it goes through a series of snapshots in this couple's life, just depicted through the different beds that they've had over the years. "There's a song called The Bed Song by Amanda Palmer," says Brier. The inspiration for that came from a song. Instead, the player pieces together the life of a young woman through objects unpacked into each room at different stages of her life. One of the most powerful aspects of Unpacking's narrative is that it's almost entirely wordless. I caught up with Brier and Dawson before the BAFTAs to discuss the game's development. Unpacking's success has seen the indie "zen puzzle game" beat a number of big AAA games to several awards (not least Eurogamer's own Game of the Year last year), and find itself cast as a gentle, queer David to the Goliaths of Returnal, It Takes Two, and Metroid Dread. So shocked were they at taking home gongs for Narrative and the public voted Game of the Year the couple didn't even have a speech prepared. Absolutely unreal." That's how Wren Brier and Tim Dawson, the creators of Unpacking, described their double win at the BAFTA Games to me last week.
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