It’s weird how coming back to your hometown can make you feel two inches tall. I moved out of my parent’s house years ago, got a job, a husband, some fur babies and hit the milestones typically associated with adulthood. But the entire time I’ve lived within spitting distance of my hometown: Portsmouth, Virginia. I can’t go anywhere without seeing ghosts; I walk by the stores where I got my high school wardrobe, the theaters my friends and I frequented, the mall — the nice one, not the lame one where we always hung out — that we’d beg our parents to drop us off at. Those memories relentlessly tear me down until I’m a kid again at 29.

Moving only puts that smallness into stark relief. Come the new year, I’ll be halfway across the country. Everything I own is being sized up and pared down until it’s tiny enough to fit into a few boxes and a truck. There’s a subtle satisfaction to be found in the Tetris-like challenge of putting everything neatly away, only to reverse the process in an entirely new space. That’s the idea behind “Unpacking" from developer Witch Beam. Described as a Zen puzzle game, it turns moving into a series of problems to be solved. How do you find the right home for every item amid boxes and boxes of stuff? All the while, you discover more about the life you’re unpacking through some truly first-rate environmental storytelling. The character catalogues each move in a photo album, which functions as the level select screen, along with a short caption — they’re the only lines of dialogue in the entire game.

There are eight moves in total, starting with the character’s childhood bedroom. Knickknacks follow them from home to home like relics of time passed. They go to college, move in with a boyfriend, move back home. At one point, I unpacked a photo of a man and a woman and pinned it to a bulletin board along with the others, but it glowed red, an indication the item’s in the wrong place. Confused, I tried to lay it elsewhere, on the nightstand, on the desk, but nope, still red. I opened the dresser and shoved it inside next to some old board games, totally out of sight, and got a gold star for completing the level. Bad breakup? With the next move, I unpacked only one toothbrush instead of two. Yep, bad breakup.

Most of these moves take place throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, and if those were some of your formative years (as they were mine), the nostalgia hits hard. Among the toys in the character’s childhood bedroom are a Tamagotchi and Game Boy. That same Game Boy comes to college with them, where I also unpacked a beast of a desktop computer and could practically hear the dial-up modem sound. A few moves later, I was happy to see they’ve upgraded their GameCube to a Wii, and I recognized the cover art on some of the games I put away.

Witch Beam was right, playing “Unpacking” is a Zen experience. Its soundtrack, a synthy mix of acoustic guitar and lofi beats by BAFTA award-winning composer Jeff van Dyck, sets the mood while you sort through the boxes at your own pace with no timers or scores to worry about. There’s a sense of ritual in packing (and unpacking, by extension) because while it’s an intentional process, it’s not a particularly difficult one. Between considering each item’s worth and whether to keep it, carefully packing everything away to (hopefully) make the trip in one piece, wondering what you’ll find in the next box, and inevitably lingering on the nostalgia one thing or the other kicks up, it’s hard to do mindlessly. That duality — the simple satisfaction of mechanically putting everything in its place alongside the more ambiguous emotions stirred up in the process — is why “Unpacking’s” story still feels compelling with minimal dialogue and exposition.

I’ve noticed that same duality as I manage my own move. Packing feels like both a mindless reprieve from work and a rite of self-reflection. I get stopped by the little knickknacks I still have from my childhood home, just like the character in “Unpacking." They’ve survived so many moves at this point (all within 20 miles of the street on which I grew up) that it feels sacrilegious to get rid of them. I while away time wondering what sort of story someone might piece together if they unpacked these boxes. I hope it’s a good one — or at least interesting.

While I’m excited to start this new chapter of my life, leaving my hometown behind is bittersweet. When you grow up in the kind of place that I did, you’re taught to do whatever it takes to get out. Getting out means you’ve made it. Leave all this behind, the poverty, the hardship, and do better than the ones who came before you. When the character in “Unpacking” moves back into her childhood bedroom after the breakup, her photo album caption mentions how much bigger the room used to feel. Even though they’ve grown, it feels like a step backward, like they’re shrinking themselves, both in a physical and cognitive sense, to fit the same space they did as a kid.

I’ve internalized that “get out” mind-set so deeply that the shame over not having left yet feels like a reflex. If you asked me why I’m so desperate to leave, I couldn’t tell you in any specific detail. There’s just this deep-rooted sense that I’m somehow behind, not yet a full-fledged adult because I’m still where I was 10 years ago. Now that I’m actually getting out, though, it hurts to leave the only place I’ve ever known, and I’m starting to realize I’ll miss it more than I ever thought I would. I don’t know when or even if I’ll feel like I’ve “made it” after I unpack everything at my new home, but there’s a quiet contentment in knowing that I’m pushing forward.