Unpacking is a pretty special game for me: for just how clever it is, and how much my girlfriend fell in love with it. We're actually planning to move in together in the near future, and we keep using the game as a point of reference (I keep saying I want to learn to make a small, personalized version of it just for her!)
I am also really, REALLY impressed by its overall design and narrative design. It's a game that says so much without dialogue or many traditional narrative devices at all, but it feels very personal and true to its core character and her life.
I wrote up creative director Wren Brier's (fantastic) GDC talk on designing the game, and how the small team used what they called "subtractive design" to cut out any excess baggage from the core of what they really wanted to make:
"This is where subtractive design comes in. subtractive design is all about strengthening the core of a game by removing anything that isn't serving the core ideas. This subtracting happened very early on in our design process when we were first prototyping, so we were only subtracting conceptually rather than removing bits we'd already put in the game. That would be expensive. We challenged our own biases and questioned everything, even if it seemed obvious and even if it's how a lot of games do it. Anything we do or don't do on a game is a design choice."
"And every choice comes at a cost. The time it takes to implement something can be used to improve something else. And one choice may not be compatible with another choice that would have been better with the game we're trying to make... We really had to understand what our game was about at its heart."
I also loved the toilet statistic Brier noted at the top of the talk. That's the good stuff!
(Is Unpacking an immersive sim because it lets you flush the toilets? Makes you think...)