Simpler Times is pretty much the opposite of 2021’s hit game Unpacking: here, it is all about packing up. Taina is getting ready to leave her family home to go to university, and as she packs away her belongings, each cherished object takes her on a contemplative journey. “She’s having second thoughts,” says game director Dragos Matkovski. “She’s having doubts about moving into this next chapter of her life. And the reason why you, as a player, revisit her memories is to find out that, actually, she’s doing the right thing.”
Matkovski was born in Moldova but now lives in Transylvania in Romania, where his studio, Stoneskip, is based. “The studio itself was born around this project,” he says. “The origin of the game was simply me experimenting with 3D art.” In the midst of the Covid pandemic, Matkovski idly began recreating the room he was stuck in as a 3D model, then posted his progress online. The positive feedback he received persuaded him to turn his room into something people could play.
But the idea for a game about moving had been brewing for several years. Matkovski had lived in Berlin for a few months, and was inspired by the beautiful places he stayed in, places that he could feel people had really loved. “What if I create something about love for a place?” he thought.
The irony is that Matkovski moved a lot with his family when he was a child, so he never had a room that he could consider his own. “But this game is about exactly that,” he says. “About a room that you have fallen in love with throughout your childhood.” Matkovski decided to collaborate with designer Laara Bonn, who had similar childhood experiences. “I also had to move a lot when I was a child, and I never had a room that was mine and just mine,” she says. “But I did have these small trinkets that I would carry with me, from home to home.”
Taina’s room is full of such trinkets, objects that each carry a story, and you can journey back into her memories by playing a record on the turntable. “A song might remind you about a place or a moment in your life – that’s definitely something that happens to us,” says Matkovski. “We took that feeling and built the scene-switching mechanic of the game around it.”
Taina’s memories involve things such as constructing a birdhouse, or building a model rocket, and all the many objects you can interact with in her room are lovingly detailed – particularly the books. It comes as no surprise to learn that Bonn has designed several book covers in real life. “You find out about the character through the objects in the room,” she says. “And so we started to think about her personality and what books she would read … philosophy, design, nature.”
Simpler Times is designed to be a meditative, mindful experience centred on patience and attention, with no failure or pressure to succeed. Matkovski says he would be happy if people just used it to play records on the turntable. Above all, it’s about celebrating simple objects, and cherishing the tangible things that connect us with the world.
“We tried to make the interactions with the physical objects as satisfying as possible, because we feel like we live in a world where we are slowly losing physical interactions with objects, such as the turntable and the Walkman,” says Matkovski. “Maybe people are getting overwhelmed by all the new and changing technology. We look back to these simple objects that didn’t require so much attention from us – because right now you can buy a refrigerator which sends you notifications.”
Simpler Times will be out on PC in 2024
