Unpacking tells a life story through placing household objects

Witch Beam, the Brisbane studio behind twin-stick shooter Assault Android Cactus, set out to make something quieter. The question the team gave itself was whether an entire life could be told through the most mundane act of all — taking possessions out of boxes after a house move and finding each one a home.

Tell a life story with no text or dialogue: unpack and place belongings across eight house moves, and the objects — what stays, what vanishes — carry the narrative.

Unpacking drops players into real rooms across eight moves, from a first bedroom to shared flats to family homes, and asks them to place every object that comes out of the boxes. There are no cutscenes, no dialogue and no on-screen characters: a framed photo that always travels, belongings that vanish after a breakup, a diploma that appears — each room is built from what the unseen protagonist keeps, upgrades or leaves behind, and fitting the puzzle is the same action as telling the story.

The wordless premise won Unpacking the BAFTA Games Award for Best Narrative and the public-voted EE Game of the Year at the 2022 ceremony, plus the Innovation Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards. Critics and players filled in the emotional gaps themselves, making restraint itself the talking point.

Unpacking is a zen puzzle game about the familiar experience of pulling possessions out of boxes and fitting them into a new home. Developed by Brisbane studio Witch Beam, it spans eight house moves and invites players to build satisfying living spaces while learning clues about the life they are unpacking — a character they never see and a story they are never told.

Every level is a real room and every object must find a home: books, mugs, posters, clothes, keepsakes. Because the protagonist never speaks and no text explains her, the objects do the narration — what she keeps from an old life, what she leaves behind, what she gains as the rooms grow from a single bedroom to shared homes and beyond.

The idea came from pairing the block-fitting satisfaction of arranging a space with the quiet drama of moving on. 'We're not telling a complicated story in Unpacking, but the way we tell it is different,' said designer Wren Brier as she accepted the BAFTA for Best Narrative alongside technical director Tim Dawson in 2022.

The gamble paid off beyond the design community: Unpacking also won the EE Game of the Year Award at the 2022 BAFTA Games Awards, the only category voted on by the British public, beating nominees including It Takes Two and Deathloop, and took the Innovation Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards.

It replaced dialogue and cutscenes with an everyday action almost everyone has performed — unpacking after a move.

The rooms worked as environmental evidence: what a character keeps, upgrades or discards reveals her life without a word.

Object placement fused puzzle and narrative, so storytelling was the gameplay rather than a layer on top of it.

The restraint scaled: mundane rooms carried enough detail for players to project their own lives onto the story.

When every medium is shouting, silence can be the loudest choice: a story told through the placement of everyday objects trusts players to fill the emotional gaps themselves.

Unpacking launched in November 2021 on PC and then Nintendo Switch and Xbox, with Witch Beam and publisher Humble Games behind it. At the 2022 awards season it won the BAFTA for Best Narrative and the public-voted EE Game of the Year, as well as the Innovation Award and Best Audio at the Game Developers Choice Awards, and it was nominated in several more categories. The game became a reference point for wordless environmental storytelling in indie games, showing that a character never seen and a story never told could still win a mainstream public vote.