Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: idols, coat hangers, and the pit...

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing,
here's our archive.

At first glance, the Idol Manager looks like a simple management sim about girl groups and the idol industry. You get a job as a manager and is tasked to create a new girl group that would sweep the nation. You hold auditions, train your group, release singles, and eventually put the company on the map.

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I don't know this virtual woman whose cartons I'm unpacking, not really - I never see her face or hear her voice, but I feel connected to her all the same, just through the act of unpacking her belongings. Unpacking is what it says on the tin, a short game about unpacking after a move, but developer Witch Beam somehow managed to fit a whole life inside, expressed through holiday souvenirs, shampoo brands and plush animals.

Unpacking follows a woman across 6 formative moves over a timespan of roughly twenty years, starting with her childhood bedroom. Each move starts with boxes, neatly stacked in a random room, inviting you to just pull things out and find a place for them. Where you place items is largely up to you - Unpacking has a few rules and is fairly strict about you just dumping things on the floor, but you're given plenty of freedom, and if you don't like that the magnetic whiteboard absolutely has to go on the fridge, you can even activate an accessibility setting that lets you put stuff wherever.

Witch Beam warns that this removes the puzzle element, but Unpacking is really just a puzzle in the way life's limited spaces are, the way you tetris all of your pans into the cupboard just so and the sock drawer in real life likely has to hold more socks than it was designed to. You can open drawers, hang clothes hangers and stack some items, and it only ever gets fiddly if you've already stacked things close together and try to separate them again. On the Switch in handheld mode, the view is automatically zoomed in a bit, as things get too small for you to have the whole room on display and still effectively work, but that's the only niggle with that particular version of Unpacking.

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