You might not think stacking plates and organizing books is compelling, but strangely, it really is. Though the mechanics are simple and the campaign can be completed in a handful of hours, Unpacking is a memorable, delightful game that shows that there are still new ways to tell stories in video games out there. Unpacking takes you through a series of homes representing an invisible protagonist’s life from 1997 to 2018, and as it turns out, you can tell a lot about a person by the things they take with them. In Unpacking, described by its creators as a “zen puzzle game,” settling into a new place is surprisingly comforting. Because of this, he has fallen even further out of the public's favor, making it tougher and tougher for most to revisit his seminal creation.In real life, moving is the worst. It was during this period that much of the abuse occurred. Byrd, who was 13 when she first communicated with Kricfalusi directly, desperately wanted a career in animation and eventually moved to Los Angeles to live with her idol. The young women, Robyn Byrd and Katie Rice, were aspiring animators who idolized Kricfalusi. And as Buzzfeed reported in 2018, he had multiple sexually abusive relationships with underage girls over the course of his career. Happy Happy Joy Joy reveals that in the decades following the death of The Ren and Stimpy Show, people had plenty of stories about the verbal and psychological abuse they endured while working with Kricfalusi. Kricfalusi’s abuse extended both within and far beyond the Spumco offices. Camp and company stopped producing episodes in 1995. Bob Camp took over the show after its creator left, but The Ren and Stimpy Show never truly recovered. The ultimate price, though, was the morale of the studio's biggest trailblazers, missed deadlines, and Kricfalusi's eventual firing. For Kricfalusi himself, the immediate cost was often re-drawing characters and scenes a hundred times before arriving at a quality product. This was never a formal thing, but it was absolutely something Kricfalusi expected from his team. The folks at Spumco were bold, ambitious, creatively unfettered animators who all fell in line under their leader's unspoken edict: quality at any cost. There was no question that the guy had passion. The animators clearly reveled in that particular reveal, even introducing him as a feminine silhouette before shattering the illusion altogether. There's something grotesque and hysterical about putting a big-nosed man in white garb, hanging him on a pair of feeble, fluttering wings, and calling him the Nerve-Ending Fairy. It forced fans into an imagination that was singularly deranged, darkly funny, and unapologetically disgusting. Kricfalusi and his team pulled audiences into the characters' experiences and refused to loosen their stranglehold on their imaginations. In “Space Madness,” you taste the bar of soap as a crazed Ren gobbles it up, convinced that Stimpy is after his “Ice Creeeem” bar. And the series is full of similar moments. Thanks to some vivid close-ups, you feel a cartoon character's rotting tooth. When Ren learns the putrid perils of his unbrushed chompers in “Ren's Toothache,” you smell the stench coming from his mouth. One of the show's defining elements was its texture.
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