What the Game Unpacking Gets Right About Moving In

The last box from my previous move sat in the hallway for eleven days. It was labelled "misc", it held a power strip, two picture hooks and a single oven glove, and every time I walked past it I felt a small, specific kind of defeat. I had planned the packing down to the tape colour. I had planned nothing about the other end.

That gap is common. Most moving advice stops at the front door of the new place, as if the job ends when the van leaves. The first week inside is where people lose sleep, eat takeaway five nights running and start resenting a house they chose on purpose. Oddly, the clearest lesson I have found on that week came from a small puzzle game about taking things out of boxes.

A game that is only the second half of a move

Unpacking, made by the Brisbane studio Witch Beam and released in November 2021, skips everything you would expect a moving game to contain. There is no truck, no packing, no deposit to chase. Each level opens on an empty room and a stack of closed cartons, and your only job is to lift objects out one at a time and decide where they live. Across eight moves you follow one unnamed woman from a childhood bedroom to a shared house, without a line of dialogue.

What makes it more than a cosy toy is the check at the end of each level. The game will not let you finish while anything sits somewhere implausible. Leave a toothbrush on the bookshelf and it glows red until you move it. Put a frying pan in the bedroom and the level stays open. You can be messy for as long as you like, but you cannot call it done until every item has a sensible home.

I have finished it twice now, and the second time I noticed how my own play had changed. On the first run I opened whichever box was nearest. On the second I opened boxes room by room, and I was done in roughly two thirds of the time.

Why the first week goes wrong in real homes

The cause is rarely laziness. It is that a half unpacked house still works, badly, and so the pressure to finish drops the moment you can cook one meal and find one clean shirt. After that, each remaining box is a small decision you keep postponing. In the game, the red glow refuses to let you postpone. In a real house, nothing does.

A second cause is that boxes get opened in the order they come off the van, which is the order they went on, which is usually the reverse of what you need. The heavy stuff, books and tools, goes in first and comes out last, while the kettle sits buried under a rug somewhere in the garage.

The third is the one Unpacking handles best. Some objects do not fit the new place. In one level the woman moves into a partner's flat, and there is visibly no room for her things. Her framed degree ends up under the bed, because no wall will take it. Players talk about that moment more than any other in the game, and it is the most honest picture of moving I know: the new home was arranged before you arrived, and some of what you carried in will not get a good spot.

The advice I would stop following

You will read that the right approach is to unpack one room completely before starting the next. I tried that on my last move, and it failed by the second evening. A complete living room is no use if you cannot find the bath towels.

The game points to a better order, though it never states it. Its rooms are small, so you finish each one quickly, and the satisfaction of a finished room carries you into the next. A real house does not split into small rooms by itself, so you have to create those small finishes. The unit I now use is a function, not a room: "I can shower", "I can make breakfast", "I can work at a desk". Each one crosses several rooms and each one is finishable in under an hour.

Unpack by what you need to do tomorrow morning, not by which room the box says it belongs in.

The first seventy two hours, in the order I would do them again

Here is the sequence I worked out across my last two moves, roughly matched to the way a level in the game ramps from a few obvious items to the awkward leftovers. The times are what it took me in a three bedroom semi with 43 boxes, so scale them to your own load.

1. Bed made and blackout sorted, first two hours. A rested person makes fewer bad placement decisions. Hang a sheet over the bedroom window if the curtains are not up yet.
2. Bathroom working, same evening. Towels, toilet roll, soap, one shower product each. It takes about twenty minutes and changes how the whole house feels.
3. Breakfast possible, before bed on day one. Kettle, two mugs, two bowls, a pan, the cutlery tray. Leave the rest of the kitchen boxes shut.
4. A clear route through the house, day two. Stack every unopened box against one wall of a single spare room. Seeing the floor again matters more than it sounds.
5. Kitchen fully done, day two. It holds the most items and the most decisions, so do it while you still have energy.
6. Work or study corner, day three. Desk, chair, router, chargers. If you work from home, this jumps to day two.
7. The "under the bed" box, end of day three. Gather everything that has no obvious place into one carton, write today's date on it and put it away. Look again in a month.

That last step is the one I took straight from the game. The degree under the bed is sad in the story, but it is also practical. You do not need to solve the place of every object in the first week. You need to stop seeing the unsolved ones every time you walk down the hall.

What the game cannot teach you

It is worth being clear about the limits. Unpacking has no weight, no stairs and no partner who disagrees about where the plates go. It never asks you to assemble flat pack furniture with a missing bolt. It also hands you a house that is already clean and painted, which almost never happens in a move I have heard about from readers. If the new place needs work, the first week looks different, and the guide on what renovation games teach about improving a home is a better match for that situation.

It also misses the packing side completely, so it pairs well with the piece on what game inventory limits teach about packing. Pack with the unpacking order already in mind and the second half gets far easier. My rule now: anything in the first three steps of the list above travels in the car, not the van.

And it says nothing about feeling at home, which in my experience takes far longer than a week. The data I have seen from removal firm surveys tends to put it at several months. A game can model where a lamp goes. It cannot model the first evening the street noise stops sounding strange.

One thing to do this week

If you have a move coming, take a marker and add a second label to every box you have already packed: the function it serves, written as a short phrase like "sleep", "shower", "breakfast" or "later". Load the "later" boxes into the van first. If you have already moved and a few cartons are still sitting in the hall, give yourself one evening to make a single dated "under the bed" box and clear the rest. More practical notes for the days around a move are in our moving section.