The secret mode of ‘Unpacking’ allows you to be the mess that you truly are during moves

I’m going to tell you something personal: the first game I played on my brand new PS5 was not ‘God of War Ragnarok‘ or ‘Astro’s Playroom’, but a little indie game that gave me a lot of peace of mind: ‘Unpacking’. If you haven’t heard of it, you’re in luck, because the gameplay based on moving is terribly beautiful, it can tell a story in a surprising (and, at times, heartbreaking) way, and it will make you fall in love. However, you don’t move like that.

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Time to move!

We have all moved at some point, and we know what it’s like: clothes on the floor, movies not sorted, the closet in complete chaos. It’s normal. And that’s why ‘Unpacking’ is almost science fiction: after the move, everything is neatly organized and in its place. But there is a secret way that allows us to unleash the absolute mess that we really are.

And it all started as a joke: in 2022 Witch Beam, the developers, released a video on April Fools’ Day (the American April Fools’ Day) in a way that you could leave everything wherever you wanted and still beat the game. But it wasn’t a joke: it actually existed, and it has gone viral again after a TikTok video.

You don’t have anything special to do: just start playing and instead of putting everything in its place, put everything on the floor, as if it were a kind of massive Tetris. If you succeed, the game will not only not tell you that you have placed it wrong, but it will let you move from screen to screen rewarding you for leaving the house in a mess.

The mode in question is called Dark Star and the developers introduced it to provide more possibilities to beat the game. Because at first it’s fun, but then it’s literally a lot of extra work. “It’s another way of thinking about objects, how they relate to our lives and the spaces we live in”, says Tim Dawson, the creator of ‘Unpacking’. That and the absolutely visceral pleasure of becoming messy even when moving and organizing pixels.

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