Games like Unpacking are a genre in themselves these days: games where you don’t just focus on decorating, but on taking things out of boxes. This is better than putting things in boxes, the worst part of moving, and it also brings an element of surprise to setting up a room. Unpacking-like game Hozy came out this week, adding another twist to the formula in that before you can spend hours arranging little tchotchkes, you need to clean the space up first.
There’s a light narrative to Hozy about coming back to your hometown, with small bits of text and character portraits telling you vague things about the diorama-like settings you have to fix up. Your sister’s first apartment is piled high with trash; a sprawling penthouse tended to by a lonely robot vacuum was the abode of someone who “couldn’t buy happiness.” All this gives a little bit of context and emotion to the spaces, and can guide the way you set up the place.
But before you can do any of that you have to tidy up. This usually involves clicking trash to put it in a bin, dragging a mop across a dirty floor or a squeegee over the windows, or painting the walls from limited colors. In some levels you need to rip up and lay flooring, sweep up leaves from outdoor spaces, or saw boards to make them even. You do this with tiny in-world tools that can sometimes be floaty or imprecise, but it’s always a clever, enjoyable way to engage with the space and start thinking about its potential.
Once a space is ready, boxes appear. You can guess the size of items that might be in them from their shape, opening the door to a little bit of strategy. When I played Hozy’s demo back in February I had a tendency to just pull everything out and heap it up until there was no room to put anything anywhere, but this time around I went through things one box at a time, sometimes going back to rearrange stuff if a new item felt like it should be in a certain spot. Items range from big stuff like chairs, tables, and rugs (there are a lot of rugs in this game, which really got me thinking about my own life choices vis-a-vis being anti-rug), to paintings and statues, to the tiniest teacups or little bits of decor. A level is complete once you’ve unpacked everything and put it somewhere, but you have unlimited time to rearrange things into the exact configuration you want, and there’s a photo mode to commemorate your creations.
I was impressed with just how much stuff you can fill Hozy’s spaces with; I can’t remember ever seeing the same chair or painting or even little item from one level to another. Sometimes I clashed against this–you’d think the rich penthouse owner would have furniture that matches–but in other levels it gave a sense of character to the space, like the mismatched chairs of a pharmacy-turned-cafe. And the stuff tells the story of a space too: paintbrushes and palettes for an artist’s studio, or two walkie-talkies for some kids’ treehouse. In the latter example, I tried to give each kid a little narrative through my items, throwing shoes willy-nilly around one kid’s bed while neatly lining them up for the other to try to capture two very different people sharing a small space.
If you don’t like something in a level, you can drop it off the side to put it away, which lets you exert a little control over the story-through-stuff of a space. The artist had a series of Halloween pumpkins I found ugly and didn’t want to use, while in the musician’s apartment I kept pulling out a series of cat toys shaped like rats that eventually won me over in their sheer volume. A lot of the items weren’t things I’d personally decorate a space with, or clashed with my vision for a musician’s home or young person’s lofted flat, but when combined with Hozy’s simple narrative, it felt like I was making a space for specific people, instead of designing a place of my own.
Also, as I pointed out in the newsletter I wrote about the game's demo, the menu rules:
Hozy is a chill little game to tinker with, even if the tidying can sometimes feel a bit clumsy. I always feel a little weird playing decorating games when my real-life house is a mess (looking for a place for a bike in one of Hozy’s levels made me feel guilty about how all my bike and camping stuff is just piled in the corners in my bedroom in a way that screams “single man who lives alone”), but it was a nice way to unwind after a long day, and to imagine the lives of other people through where they keep their stuff.
Zoë Hannah
