Don't Get Your Hopes Up

Don't Get Your Hopes Up is a short interactive comic about housing shortage and horror in architecture. Based on desperate apartment searches undertaken in 2022 and 2024, and drawing from a half decade of conversations about Amsterdam's housing crisis, the game moves between fiction, documentary, and social commentary. With disquiet and creeping unease, it dismantles the consoling fictions of abundance, and laments a feeling of home that's always just beyond reach. Short, emotional, and relatable (unless you're a landlord) Playtime: 40-60 minutes. Dive into a week of apartment hunting through the eyes of Krish and Yan, a couple looking to find an apartment in Amsterdam. Classic visual novel gameplay meets sparse, parallax comic book illustrations, with a few narrative and mechanical twists. View odd apartments and make tough decisions on renting and overbidding. Experience a moving story about precarity, solidarity, alienation, and the systems that keep us apart. A haunting post-punk soundscape Immerse yourself in a haunting, propulsive soundscape featuring music by Simon Frank and a special track by Rotterdam band Neighbours Burning Neighbours. A uniquely Amsterdam story that is resonant everywhere "EVERYTHING HAS TO CHANGE, FOR ANYTHING TO STAY THE SAME." Learn a wayward history of contemporary Amsterdam that is resonant globally. Play through a carefully constructed bricolage of references, ideas, speculations, and social commentary about the housing crisis that attempts to distill fleeting perceptions of an ambient present into coherent yet unsettling images. "State-of-the-art maleficence”, with inspirations from Leila Taylor’s Sick Houses, Joshua Comaroff and Ker-Shing Ong’s Horror in Architecture, and Ayşegül Savaş’ The Anthropologists.