‘Pack’ Needs You to Store Items Within Items Within Items

Pack needs you to load up a suitcase, but doing so involves carefully seeing what items can be put inside other things to make it all fit.

You’re off on some sort of trip and you need to pack up everything you’ll need to go on a handful of excursions to a couple of different places. Each one sees you trying to stow a whole bunch of different things inside your suitcase. You also appear to have a tendency to pack to the point where you’ll fill the exact dimensions of your suitcase, leaving absolutely no other space left over. So, best plan out where everything is gonna go if you’re going to make your flight.

The immediate thought when you start this game is to start plunking things down, Resident Evil 4-style, in the suitcase and then move them around to make them all fit. It doesn’t take long before you see that this is pointless; there’s just not enough room if you try to shove everything in the suitcase. However, once you unzip your laptop bag and see that you can fit additional things inside of it, your plan becomes clear. I admit, I felt I had the game pretty muchy figured out at that point and it would be an easy road to the end. I was wrong, as the ability to store things in other objects opens the game up to get really creative about what things can go inside of other stuff. Thankfully the game doesn’t judge me for mixing up my Magic and Uno cards.

Pack managed to take me by surprise a few times during its brief play time, delighting me with its art style and the creative solutions it makes you come up with to get that suitcase closed.

Pack is available now on itch.io.

About The Author

Joel Couture

Joel has been covering indie games for various sites including IndieGames.com, Siliconera, Gamasutra, Warp Door, CG Magazine, and more over the past seven years, and has written book-length studies on Undertale and P.T.. Joel is constantly on the lookout for digital experiences that push the boundaries of what games can be, and seeks to delve into the creative process, meanings, and emotion labor that goes into the work of artists worldwide.