Don’t Get Your Hopes Up is all architectural horror, human warmth, and unnervingly stoic pigeons

“The following is a work of fiction,” opens Don’t Get Your Hopes Up. “Amsterdam does not exist”. This was news to me, having a distinct memory of my mum on holiday, grinningly sending me a photo of her first time encountering a SMEG fridge in the wild. I’ll put aside my own opinions re: places that are real for now, though, since I wouldn’t necessarily put it past the planet to swallow up entire capital cities for the lols right now. Just leave De Poezenboot alone, yeah?

Don’t Get Your Hopes Up bills itself as a “short interactive comic about housing shortage and horror in architecture”, although I think ‘short interactive comic’ is underselling it a little. It’s under an hour long, though, and is also very free. Most other things I could say about it will necessarily reveal small parts of the experience you may wish to remain unspoilt on, so I’ll do some preliminary gushing here: I had a hard time finding a single sentence in this thing I didn’t want to screenshot. Multimedia techniques bolster an attendant and skilful but ultimately playful literary quality, and some plain brilliant penpersonship. Also, it introduced me to the band Neighbours Burning Neighbours. So, do dig in.

Right, so. I wrote the entire first paragraph, revealing my eternal association of the city of Amsterdam with the homeware brand SMEG, without leaving that first screen. The game opens on what I immediately assume is a character named Yan’s apartment. It’s very beautiful, with the sun casting “an olive glow” on its “honey coloured cupboards”. It also features a SMEG kettle. Should Amsterdam exist at any point in the future, I predict SMEG will do a roaring trade there.

It doesn’t take long to release that this a flat viewing. I have been fooled into allowing myself to bask in the starring duo’s implied warmth and comfort at having somewhere lux to live. I have, in other words, gotten my hopes up, mere seconds after the game specifically told me not to do that, n’all. Yan tells Prof. Dr. Landlady (real name) that they’re a PhD student. “You probably don’t make a lot of money,” they reply, in exactly the way someone named ‘Prof. Dr. Landlady’ would.

I think I’ve probably already written about my thoughts on subtlety when trying to explore an issue before (e.g I don’t think it’s necessary. Sometimes you want three power chords and a chanted chorus). This said, characters being this definitionally villainous in a “You’ll never achieve your perfectly reasonable dreams, wayward heroes!” way does make me wonder where the line is. I bring this up because I think it’s fair to describe at least one of the parallel journeys I took with the game as me challenging it to overcome a certain automatic weariness I have for projects that are very distinctly “about” something in a polemic sense. It doesn’t take much though, honestly. Be righteous – just be charming about it. Luckily, this thing is charming as hell.

After the viewing, each day opens with you sending out house viewing applications. It’s part manic and part meditative – a soul-grinding ritual lent a glow of comfort through repetition. Say what you want about constant rejection, at least its reliable. After that, you’ll go for some actual viewings: You and Yan losing each other but reuniting in isolated screams 16 floors down in an impossibly subterranean basement apartment that repeats on itself like twin mirrors reflecting twin mirrors. A landing overtaken by the smell of “mass-market fish sauce”, heralding a court of stoic pigeons, inviting you to a pitch-black cave of a domicile haunted by extinct species. Still, there’s rarely an option to not apply to any of them. The piece does a powerful job of making this sort of desperation feel believable, but there’s also a wonderful sense of communal resilience in the sense that your character doesn’t have to endure any of this alone.

Having just finished it, my strongest memory of Don’t Get Your Hopes Up is the map of the city you periodically return to between scenes. It’s so detailed, full of nodes and twisting streets and various unique flourishes, and with them, the promise of a non-linear interactivity that never materialises. This feels right. It fits. You are, after all, at the whims of a concrete beast that does not bend to your will easily. Still, that’s no reason to give up now.