Moving Out, Moving On

A fan gently whirls on the ceiling, another box fan resting in the window. The light is growing thinner, and there’s a bit of music still playing. There’s not much left to do, except toss a few things into cardboard boxes.

Packing Up the Rest of Your Stuff on the Last Day at Your Old Apartment (PUTROYSOTLDAYOA) is a pocket game, what Nina Freeman would call a vignette game. It’s a slow, near meditative experience about packing up your entire life into a bunch of boxes and heading out. It’s practical, but emotive. There’s memories to be had in every object, slow turns that let you think about whether it’s worth it to pack this or to toss it to the always-there donation trash bag. A couple of empty mugs, a potted plant, your old math textbook. The detritus of day-to-day life. You’ll be doing the same thing in another year. Rinse. Repeat.

Millennials are a generation of renters (there’s about a thousand think pieces on the phenomenon, but here’s one from Forbes) and this experience, a life packed away, is not novel. Maybe we move once a year, across the country or just down the road, for new jobs, new loves, new spaces. A generation of nomads, tied more to student debt than mortgages. PUTROYSOTLDAYOA isn’t about the looming peril of financial institutions or your mother continuing to tell you that you should be buying a house because renting is just throwing money away. What is it about is tossing all your shit into boxes and bags and hightailing it out of there on the last day of your lease.

There’s something infinitely more simple about that.

Take a moment and take a breath and pack up that pair of hiking boots and those plates your parents bought you that you didn’t actually need. Listen to the train passing your apartment for the last time before clicking off the lights. In a year it’ll be a new place, a new love, a new window overlooking new trees. Another year, another move.

You can play Packing Up the Rest of Your Stuff on the Last Day at Your Old Apartment on itch.io.