Five Games That Are Perfect For Moving House

Moving house can be one of the most stressful and emotionally draining experiences imaginable. Our entire lives are condensed into just a few nondescript boxes before we ship them on to pastures anew. While these big changes are usually accompanied by huge life milestones, it doesn’t change the fact that moving house is both emotionally and physically taxing.

As always, video games are here for us in these trying times. Whether it’s to help you make a plan of action, get you in the mood for packing, or take your mind off the whole thing, games can help ease the undoubtedly stressful ordeal.

Here are a few games that you might find useful while moving house.

THE Sims 4

The Sims 4 is the ultimate moving house fantasy if you play it properly. And by properly, I mean with cheats. Part of the excitement and frustration that comes with moving home is thinking about how your new digs will be laid out and decorated. Will the room you’ve earmarked for an office actually fit the desk you own? Where’s best to display your accruing Tubbz collection

By using a few cheats to give yourself unlimited money and free reign to build anywhere, you can use Sims 4 to recreate your new home. Especially if you have the floorplans to your new space, it can be especially fun trying to recreate the building one-to-one. From there, you can get a head start on your decoration and furniture layout planning.

Screenshot from Sims Snowy Escape
Credit: EA

These cheat codes will prove useful in your architectural endeavours:

  • motherload – Gives 50,000 Simoleons. Keep spamming this command to obtain an unlimited amount of currency.
  • bb.moveobjects – Combine objects by ignoring placement rules. This will let you place objects in exactly the position you want.
  • bb.showhiddenobjects – Adds extra objects to your inventory
  • bb.showliveeditobjects – Unlocks additional objects that you can place within the game world
  • bb.enablefreebuild – Lets the player have more controller over what they can move and delete

Using these cheats can turn Sims 4 into a robust settlement building tool. With a huge collection of decorative items, it might even give you some inspiration for how you can dress up your new pad. Start this project a month or so in advance of your actual move in date and you’ll have a plan of action in place ready for when the time finally comes.

Tetris Effect

Before you can reap the fun rewards of moving house, you must first commit to the less glamorous part of the process – packing. Carefully yet tightly packaging up your most valuable items into boxes is a slow process that can seem to go on forever if you’re a bit of a hoarder like me. One way to sweeten the pot is to gamify the experience, and I’m using Tetris as the perfect example.

Everyone knows what Tetris is about by now. You arrange falling patterned blocks into a grid in an attempt to clear lines and earn a high score. It can help to view the packing experience as a big game of Tetris. Devise the best way to lay out items in boxes to maximise their storage efficiency. It might also help you devise what you truly need to keep and what could maybe be finally discarded. Struggling to fit those 20 micro USB cables into a shoe box? Maybe think about whether you really need all twenty of them. If it doesn’t fit, donate it.

Tetris Effect Connected Screenshot
Credit: Enhance

Tetris Effect doubles up in this category because it’s also an exceptional meditation tool. Though it might appear so at first glance, it’s more than just a solid game of Tetris. Stunning background graphics and audio design can mesmerize the player into a trance-like state. After a long day of stressful moving activities, turning your brain off with some pseudo-meditation might be exactly what you need.

Unpacking

Following on the zen theme, Unpacking is a game in which the title says it all – it’s about unpacking a bunch of belongings into an empty home. With a clean digital art style, the player is tasked with unboxing belongings into eight empty homes. It’s part-puzzler part-narrative game in which you need to figure out the best layout for each scenario. 

Credit: Humble Games

At the same time, you’ll learn much about these character’s lives from the belongings that you unpack. Like I said at the top of this piece, there’s something unbelievably humbling about distilling your entire life into a few walls of cardboard. Unpacking claims to provide players with a level of character intimacy without ever showing their faces. The cosy indie game is set to release on Steam later on this year.

Mario kart 8 Deluxe

This one is especially relevant if you’re moving into a home shared with other people. You’re going to want something to break the ice while also easy to set up. No one wants to be messing around with bulky console units on day one. That’s where the Nintendo Switch lends itself perfectly. If there’s one game that everyone and their Nan can play, it’s Mario Kart. That’s thanks in part to its decent accessibility controls with options to automatically accelerate and steer around obstacles.

Either with split screen on a TV or via a local network, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe can serve as an excellent way to bond with your new living partners. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is currently the only Mario Kart game available for Switch, but it’s extremely comprehensive. There’s plenty of tracks, old and new, and various power options and mirrored circuits that provide hours of fun. 

mario kart 8
Credit: Nintendo

Get to know your new local takeaways at the same time and start your first night right with a good old competitive bonding session. Just don’t be that person who saves a blue shell to take the lead at the last hurdle – you might not be the most popular in the household with a trick like that.

Something Open World

This last suggestion on the list is vastly interchangeable, though the genre remains important. Once everything is unpacked and the dust is settled, you’ll more than likely need a rest. That’s where a good old open world game can really come in handy.

For me, I gravitated towards Ghost of Tsushima and the new Iki Island expansion. This game does the tried and tested open world trope extremely well. Side quests are aplenty and never take too long to complete. The gorgeous world is filled with collectibles that are actually entertaining to discover. With a minimal user interface, you have to let yourself be drawn into this world to properly navigate it. After spending several days performing manual labour and exerting mental fatigue, it’s relaxing to let yourself fall into this other world and complete relatively monotonous tasks.

ghost of tsushima
Credit: Sucker Punch Productions

If Ghost of Tsushima isn’t your thing, it’s not like you’re short of choice. There is, of course, The Witcher 3 or Breath of the Wild if you’re yet to get around to those. Returning to an older Elder Scrolls title might also be a good idea if you’re looking for something more nostalgic. The point is to find a sprawling world that you can give yourself to, escaping the stress and anxiety that might come from settling into a new place.

Have you moved house recently? Did you find that any video games helped you through the process? Let us know across our social channels.

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