Moving On

Just over 11 years ago, we moved into this house.

It was a tiring day. The moving guys shattered a glass cabinet, a fridge drawer fragmented in my mum’s hands, and we sustained several bumps and bruises. My niece, then seven years old, drew spiders on an entire pack of Post-it notes and hid them around the house; we were still finding them months later under the sink, in the kitchen drawer, in the cupboard under the stairs. It’s a small house, comparatively. It has an open plan downstairs area — which means I can hear the TV from the kitchen — and the bedrooms are small enough that they now make us feel like we can’t move very much. But at that time, it was just the two of us, and it felt huge. I couldn’t imagine filling up a house like this.

On that first night, my husband and I looked at each other profoundly exhausted. We wanted to mark the occasion, somehow, but all we really wanted was to sleep. So we watched Rubber — we were into bad movies at the time, and this was a particularly weird one made stranger by our delirium. 

“This is our home,” I said. The first place we had ever lived without other housemates.

“Yes,” Chris said.

But it didn’t feel like it yet.

We’re still here, which in itself is a bit of a miracle, given that we’re renting. After all this time, it does feel like home. I can’t imagine being anywhere else, despite knowing that we probably need to be. While the details are still up in the air, we might be moving house this year, and I’m must reckon with 11 years’ worth of items, which, despite my occasional spurts of Marie Kondo–inspired decluttering, there’s still so much of. We have had two children in that time, and they each have about a million Squishmallows. My husband has over a hundred board games, and I have too many books to count. We’re a family of comfort creatures. We like to have our things around us, like birds lining a nest, which is extremely inconvenient when you have to shift it all.

Besides all that, we now have to dig through stuff that has sat relatively untouched for years. Memory boxes, old plastic tubs stuffed with ancient relics, yellowing Wii peripherals and love letters and concert tickets. There’s something about dragging everything out and seeing it all. It’s like having a birds-eye view of your own existence: that cuddly toy my daughter clutched during her first flight. The tiny hat my kids each wore after they were born. The empty bag from the record store we spent an hour wandering around in Hollywood. I have done a lot, when I think about it. It makes me feel a strange combination of grateful that it happened, sad that it’s gone, and a little bit chastised that I have forgotten some of it. I wonder whether I appreciated it enough at the time, whether I was present enough in the moment, whether I knew how lucky I was. There’s just something about having all of your memories spread out like a puzzle, the story of my life in a patchwork jumble.

Of course, we eventually got to the gaming stuff: the consoles we set up the morning after we moved in, now lovingly packed in bubble wrap and stashed in the loft, replaced with shinier new ones; the Wii, and all the bits that go with it, like the Balance Board we wobbled on in a brief but sincere attempt to get fit; the full Rock Band kit, which we occasionally dragged out for the kids to use when they were toddlers, so they could smash out their feelings on the drums with big, satisfied smiles on their faces; the Legend of Zelda merch we used to have in the box room, before we packed it all up to make room for the nursery, one of the first acts of parental sacrifice we made, the inaugural shifting of our lifestyles in preparation for the biggest change in our lives.

There are tons of games that I have specific memories of, all involving new people and places, all of which we played in this very house that we might not be in for much longer. To be honest, going through all these memories and getting lost in nostalgia is slowing me down. Time to pack them up.

(Please scroll through each text box completely)

(GONE HOME BOX)

Gone Home is the story of a woman returning home to reckon with her past. Her father is an almost-novelist and home electronics reviewer; her mother is a wildlife conservationist; and her sister, Samantha, is a grunge grrl going through a major shift in her identity. None of them, however, are home. It’s 1995, and you control 21-year-old Katie as she explores the family home, trying to work out what happened to her family while she was studying in Europe.

We have to piece together the mystery of the family’s whereabouts by exploring, creating a picture of her family in our minds via the objects we find: the posters in Sam’s bedroom, the hefty number of electronics in the living room, the intriguing bookmark in a collection of Walt Whitman poetry. We might be used to environmental storytelling in walking sims at this point, but Gone Home was the pioneer; it was certainly the first time I had ever experienced it, and I think that’s why I still remember the details so many years later.

Family homes are loaded with memories, and exploring with Kate allows you to feel that heavy weight of the past, of the family dynamics shifting and changing within those walls. The difference between this and the kind of storytelling you find in other mediums is the control you have to explore as much as you want. Finding new objects is a bit like digging for treasure. If you’re thirsty enough for the full story, you’ll keep looking.

I played Gone Home curled up on our sofa during one of the Covid-19 lockdowns, at my husband’s urging. Being in the same building day in, day out was starting to get to us, and the lack of routine left our lives feeling loose and shapeless. We introduced “movie nights” to give us something to look forward to. The kids would watch a movie in one of their bedrooms, and we would play the backlog of interesting indie games that had been building for a while. I still remember sitting up on the sofa, wandering around Kate’s family home, slightly spooked at the thought of someone suddenly appearing, while Chris occasionally reminded me that this was very unlikely and not everything was a secret horror game (I had been recently scarred by Doki Doki Literature Club). I remember feeling safe with Chris right next to me; given how unsafe everybody felt at the time, it was like a little oasis of escapism, one that we both desperately needed. It kick-started what became a long and fruitful exploration of indie games on a Friday night and marked a shift in my thinking about what games can achieve. 

It also got me thinking about what someone would be able to piece together about us, as a family, should they nose through our things (other than thinking “this is a family of massive nerds”). Maybe they would find my son’s battered Kindle Fire and conclude that he had too much screen time. Maybe they’d spot the dust on all the board games and wonder why we didn’t play them as much nowadays. Maybe they would look at the tired paint on the walls and conclude that we were too tired for DIY. Maybe they would find my diary and see my mingled gratitude and worry (and the thought of this sends shivers down my spine: if you are a burglar reading this piece and you’re planning on plumbing my home, just know that only God can judge me. Also, we don’t have any decent valuables so you’re really wasting your time). 

You get so used to your space that you almost forget what it says about you to people who don’t live there.

(UNPACKING BOX)

Unpacking was one of the first games I ever reviewed, and what a banger to start off with. Like most people, I got into Unpacking thinking it would be a chill little puzzle game about moving with pretty pixel art. What I actually experienced was a moving — both emotionally and narratively; you move houses in the game — journey through someone else’s life.

You don’t see the protagonist until the end of the game, and there's no narration to rely on. Instead, you slowly tease apart the circumstances of her life not just through her items, but through their particular placement in her dwelling. The diploma you’re forced to place under her bed in her boyfriend’s apartment, for example, perfectly represents the amount of space he is willing to make for her. We watch this character grow over the years through the things she takes with her. We see her life unfolding in a series of images. Perhaps that’s why it’s so jarring when she moves back home into her childhood bedroom after her breakup, bringing her grown-up things with her; her houseplants and art materials don’t seem to fit naturally in the space like the Rubix cubes and lava lamps did.

I was surprised by how much that game meant to me. It reaffirmed the idea that what makes something a home is not the actual building that contains you: it’s the stuff that you amass over time that reflects who you are and what you have been through. This is a message that I, a renter in an unstable housing market with no real hope of finding a “forever home,” needed to hear. In our 15 years of marriage, Chris and I have moved three times, but we still hold onto some of the things we had when we first got married: the vintage earrings he bought me, the collector’s edition of Alan Wake we picked up even though we couldn’t really afford it, the box of wedding cards full of best wishes and hopes for our future. There are things that survive round after round of decluttering; these things make our house feel like home, and it doesn’t really matter where we are if we can bring them with us.

We played Unpacking one night when the power went out. The whole street went dark; we rushed to the windows to find our neighbors calling to each other, trying to figure out what was happening. As the emergency workers came out to fix it, the four of us snuggled together in bed around the glow of the gaming laptop, watching my daughter carefully put objects in their rightful places. We remained there, in a state of zen, for a full hour, in near-total darkness, listening to the workers chatting outside. My son became limp and sleepy next to me. We stayed there until the battery ran out. I think that’s part of the reason why Unpacking sticks in my mind as a cozy game: revisiting it still feels like stepping into a safe space with the three people I love most in the world right next to me.

There will be a moment when we move house that will test this “objects make a house a home” theory. There will be a moment when I pull the posters down and paint over my kids’ walls. We’ll roll over the purple and gray paint with a fresh coat of white, covering the Blu Tack smears and fingerprints, leaving behind an empty shell. We’ll move them into their new rooms and unpack their special toys and books and clothes, and those things will anchor us, will give us the chance to set down our roots again. But I anticipate the “empty room” moment might stinging a bit.

(HINDSIGHT BOX)

Sometimes I dream about my childhood home. In my mind, it is exactly how we left it: empty, with our rose-patterned ’90s wallpaper still on the walls and the laminate flooring shining in the kitchen, the fences my dad spent several days assembling in the back garden firmly in place. We left this home, with some trauma on my part, when I was 12. Dad had a new job, and we were moving to the opposite side of the country. On my last day there, I went back through the empty house one more time, then went outside and stood in the rain with my childhood best friend, both of us sobbing, knowing things would be different from then on, that we would inevitably grow apart due to physical distance. I think that’s why the house is empty in my dreams. Every time I visit the unreality, I feel this deep longing, but I know I’m not really supposed to be there. I’ve grown out of it, and it’s not really my home anymore.

That's how I felt playing Hindsight. As Mary, you return to your mother’s house to pack everything up after her passing. This is a heart-wrenching task that I, thankfully, haven’t had to do yet. Slowly moving from room to room, you find that certain objects can be viewed up close, and if you angle the camera in a certain way, you’re rocketed back in time, and you get to relive Mary’s memories. It can be something as small as Mary visiting church with her parents, sitting between them, contemplating the weekly ritual of it all, or setting the table according to Mary’s mother’s strict instructions, knowing that getting it wrong is not an option. I feel both sides of the story here, as a mother and a daughter myself. I remember the weight of my own parents’ expectations, as laid-back as they were; every kid feels the need to please their parents. Then I think about my own kids, how I might be making them feel, how my anxieties about what they need to learn and how they need to behave might come across in the smallest daily moments.

Mary has a complicated relationship with her mother, and although revisiting these moments brings it to light, it doesn’t fix anything. Hindsight feels achingly sad sometimes. Mary has to go on living with the knowledge that things were not how she wished they could have been with her mother; hurt was caused on both sides, from her mother’s huge expectations to Mary’s own lack of communication. There is nothing to do but accept it. Hindsight is the journey of that acceptance.

Hindsight stuck out to me as one of the more moving narratives I had experienced in some time. I played it on the Switch and finished while sitting at my work desk; I had picked it up on my lunch break and ended up crying, lost in the story of someone else’s grief and loss. Saying goodbye can be a long process, and as Mary shut the door of the house with her one box of objects clutched tight to her chest, there was a heavy finality to it all. I can’t help but think about my own parents leaving the home in which they raised me. I have never considered it from their perspective before, being too clouded by my own hurt, tweenage feelings. They probably felt an enormous amount of grief saying goodbye to the house, especially given the circumstances: both of my mother’s parents died not long before we moved away, and both of my older sisters had moved out, leaving just the three of us behind. That’s a lot of big changes in one place. That’s a lot of emotion driving the need for a fresh start. 

I have a nice memory of Mum unpacking in our new home, how laying out her ornaments and trinkets seemed to light something within her, smoothing over some of her fear and loneliness and uncertainty in an unfamiliar town. I hadn’t remembered any of that until I played Hindsight. The circumstances for this house move are very different for us; we’re staying local, and there isn’t the stress and heartbreak involved in moving schools and leaving family behind. For my kids, there will only be a little tinge of sadness, erased, hopefully, by the promise of slightly bigger bedrooms and the hope of getting a dog some time in the near future. It occurs to me that I have had more than one sleepless night, as a parent, thinking about uprooting my kids, how much it could hurt them, how I would do almost anything to stop that from happening. Maybe the move affected me more than I like to admit. Maybe I’m a bit more resistant to change than I should be.

(LiS:TC BOX)

I’m a Life is Strange girlie. Give me an emotional storyline, improbably snarky characters, and lots of emotional decisions to make. I love it.

Life is Strange: True Colors was the one game on Game Pass I was excited to pick up above all else. It’s stunning. Not just visually, either. The narrative is stunning too. You play the role of Alex, a young woman reuniting with her brother after a rocky upbringing. Gabe embraces Alex with open arms, bringing her into his home and his quiet, calm life in the mountain town of Haven Springs.

But when Gabe dies suddenly in an accident, Alex is left to pick up the pieces. Alone in a new place with unfamiliar people, she has to learn how to make a new life for herself while also trying to uncover a mystery rooted deep in the heart of Haven Springs.

The Life is Strange games often allow you to slow down and enjoy the moment, something that I find myself enjoying in video games from time to time. At one point in the game, you get to chill out in Alex’s new home as she quietly plays the guitar. At this point, it’s still Gabe’s apartment; you’re just staying in it. As the game progresses, Alex starts to settle down. You see her own papers on the desk, her clothes and gifts from friends starting to creep in. The home shifts to fit the needs of the inhabitant; slowly, it transforms from his place to hers in a process that is beautiful and painful at the same time. I guess this will happen to our house, too. Someone else will move in. Maybe they’ll take better care of the garden. Maybe they’ll paint the fences. Maybe they’ll be a young couple moving into a home ready to have children for the first time. They’ll rewrite us, eventually, which is a strange thought.

I like Life is Strange: True Colors because despite the immense heartbreak, it still feels hopeful. After everything, Alex is able to start again. You get the impression, at the end of the game, that Alex will have many new beginnings in her life, that it can perhaps be years before she settles down into a “forever” home, if she does at all: the choice is really yours, after all, Alex’s future depending on the way you play. Her life is ahead of her, with all the pitfalls and possibilities that come with reaching out into the future.

At the time of playing True Colors I was on the cusp of giving up writing about games altogether, of looking for something else; but when I finished it, it had so profoundly moved me that I realized no matter what my actual job becomes, I will have to keep writing about games in some capacity. I sat down at my desk the next morning and wrote out my feelings. I ordered a postcard for my desk advertising the benefits of Haven Springs, and it sits there on my shelf now, tucked behind a row of little dozing Snorlax figures. 

If we do move, our new house will have an office, which is new for me. I can picture myself slowly unpacking all my nerdy bits and pieces, maybe stringing up some fairy lights for atmosphere until we can properly redecorate. Maybe a fresh start in a new place, somewhere new to slowly settle into and make my own, will be another thing that drives me to continue. My new desk will bring with it new energy, and I’ll still have the Haven Springs postcard to bring back some nice memories of where I used to be.

Do places hold memories? Part of me thinks so, even though it’s scientifically improbable.

I can’t stop thinking about everything that’s happened here over the years. The ’90s party we had not long after we moved in, where Chris and I dressed as Mulder and Scully and our friends turned up as Spice Girls and characters from movies like Pulp Fiction, and we drank and ate Nerds and played PS1 games late into the night. Hundreds of board game nights and late-night roleplaying sessions. Visits from a friend who is no longer with us. Late night talks with my best friends. 

Pacing the floors, upstairs and down, with our babies, patting them and shushing them and softly singing show tunes until they fell asleep in my arms. Bath times, playtimes, head bumps, and nosebleeds. Mental health crises, late-night discos, and physical illness. Our parenting journey, the changing of our marriage to accomodate the new people we have created and become, has happened within these walls. And we might not be here for much longer. I can't quite get my head around the fact that we soon might not be here

We’ll unpack all our stuff, and slowly the new house will start to feel like a home, too. I wonder whether I have an unhealthy attachment to places. Sometimes I talk about this to my father-in-law, who still openly mourns having to sell his family home to move somewhere smaller; like me, he dreams of his old home at night, dreams of the place he raised his children and mourns the fact that he can’t be there forever. But life is a series of changes, right? Just because you’re not in a place anymore doesn’t mean that the memories have to disappear completely. And those silly little things we hold dear — everything from nerdy postcards to beloved old plushies — help us to feel safe, wherever we end up.

Life has a way of pushing you into new beginnings, whether you want them or not. I think we have wanted to move for a long time; making the leap has been a matter of waiting for the right moment. We have been stagnant here for a while. I have been stagnant for a while, in a lot of ways. I crave familiarity, but new things are good for me, and I need to push myself to get past my own fear sometimes. Post-Covid and with a decent existential crisis behind me, I am a completely different person now than I was when we moved here, and I have never had the chance to be in a new space physically to match where I am emotionally. A new start is probably just what we need. Our kids aren’t babies anymore. They’re older, with different needs and friends starting to rotate in and out of our house on any given day. The little things about living here that wind us up have become a bit unbearable. We need a fresh perspective, a way of breaking free from the stuff that’s been holding us back.