Don’t Get Your Hopes Up

Video games used to be about plumbers saving princesses or hedgehogs running very fast. And they were most joyful, albeit decidedly escapist. In 2025, the kinds of subject matter covered in the medium have widened considerably (without completely abandoning our beloved plumbers and hedgehogs). 

This brings us to Don’t Get Your Hopes Up, a game about the housing crisis in Amsterdam; that is, a game about the real world and a specific instance of its manifold inequities. Essentially a piece of semi-autobiographical social criticism, this game uses satire and surrealism to lay bare the social inequality in gaining access to housing that lies at the heart of many major European cities. In short, this isn’t Mario. (Although the protagonists of this game, it turns out, could certainly use a reliable plumber, such is the poor quality of the apartments that they are viewing). 

Using a comic book art style – plus some real-life photos and video footage – Don’t Get Your Hopes Up tells the engaging story of a week in the life of Krish (based upon the developer of the game, Krish Raghav) and Yan, who are desperately searching for an apartment – a home. Based upon real experiences, it is a moving tale that’s also full of anger; a piece of interactive fiction about the ridiculously hard real-life game of finding a place to live in today’s housing market. This is an especially difficult undertaking if, like Krish and Yan, you are also up against ingrained racism and generational privilege.

It is a brutal, unforgiving, soul-destroying endeavour, this business of securing oneself a safe, comfortable, affordable home. In an era when buildings – houses and apartments – are so often exploited as investment opportunities, when short holiday rentals make more money than long-term ones (the two major online travel accommodation companies make cameo appearances in the game), young people often face a daunting, thankless task, as this article from The Guardian suggests. The resulting poor-quality, overpriced rentals exclude so many young people from finding a home. It’s not always easy being a millennial. (It is entirely apt, in terms of its social criticism and implied moral stance, that the game is free on Steam). 

The Sisyphean nature of Krish and Yan’s search for a new home is beautifully depicted in-game through the use of repetition, the daily grind of the “Ritual of Application’: the scouring of listings, the sending of emails, and the filling out of application forms. It’s a bureaucratic minefield. As the week progresses, it soon becomes apparent that the rental market is decidedly skewed in favour of the landlords, such is the competition between applicants for the limited available housing. Krish has to sell himself, like he is applying for a job. 

This painstakingly painful process is meticulously rendered. The comic book panels and excellent writing tell the story well, encapsulating the protagonists’ perplexingly vexatious position. As Krish points out, ‘Home is just the paperwork that lets us stay somewhere.’ 

It is a game full of empathy but also frustration and anger at the inequality and injustice at work in this rigged system. It is also a politically astute game, which exposes, through its very human story, the fundamentally dysfunctional nature of the relationship between capitalism and housing.

The game also makes brilliant use of Kafkaesque surrealism and social satire to convey its meanings. Viewings of apartments often take a supernatural turn – an apartment with a mini dollhouse version of itself in a cupboard; an apartment that takes on the swamp-like form of the land upon which Amsterdam is built – as the search becomes more desperate, and the protagonists’ criteria widens to include such unsafe places as the creepy dollhouse apartment and the swampy one. The stress and anxiety caused by the relentlessness of the process cause the search to become like a surreal nightmare.

The game also makes good use of symbolism. The striking image of a grey heron initially had me stumped. It turns out that Amsterdam has an urban population of them who, as these photos from The Guardian show, seem incongruously out of place, struggling for survival in the stark, cruel, unfamiliar architectural spaces of Amsterdam (perhaps where their swamp used to be). A bit like Krish and Yan.

The game takes about one hour to complete. The lack of traditional ‘gameplay’ elements – it is, after all, a piece of immersive interactive comic book fiction – might put some people off. (Dialogue choices don’t always seem to drastically change outcomes in the game, but this is perhaps the point: Krish and Yan are often damned whatever they do).  

Likewise, the sociopolitical content might not be to everyone’s taste, especially if you play games to escape the real world. But the mere fact that this game exists highlights the rich diversity of video games in 2025, which can surely only be a good thing.