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.
Hello everyone,
Thank you so much for your very generous and kind support for this tiny game. Creating this story took a whole year of writing, drawing, and planning (+ many more years of processing my accumulated housing trauma)
Im so happy to see that the game is resonating with people. More than 12,000 people have added the game to their libraries, and the game currently has a 100% positive review score. <3
Reviews and Press
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The wonderful folks at Rock Paper Shotgun wrote a thoughtful reflection on the game , and it was featured on both my favourite Warp Door blog and the unexpected pages of Amsterdams Het Parool newspaper (paywalled).
Steam Deck Compatibility
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Since a few folks have asked, I can confirm that Dont Get Your Hopes Up works great on a Steam Deck, and is fully playable from beginning to end. Sections that require drag / scroll / mouse input translate seamlessly to the Decks touch screen, and the game uses the RenPy engines in-built controller support for controls.
Those maps of Amsterdam really pop if you have an OLED Deck. :)
Thank You for Playing
Keep those Steam reviews coming, and I would love to hear from you if the game spoke to you in any way, or if you have any critiques or questions. If youd like to share, Id also love to hear your own stories of housing precarity wherever you may be in the world. You canreach me via the email address on my website.
With much love and gratitude,
Krish // Gobi65 Games
Don\'t Get Your Hopes Up is out Tuesday September 16!
[p align=\"start\"][/p][p align=\"start\"]The game will befree to play.I would love for all of you to try it out and leave a review if you can, or share with someone who might resonate with a weird, disquieting non-fiction videogame whose horror is all-too-relevant anywhere in the world. <3\n[/p][img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/45665457/b221a9f0f91f17454c237005b30336262778ad05.png\"][/img]
[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/45665457/27e787c3fc7848e1ab3e7a6ac0348db749c7607b.png\"][/img]
[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/45665457/3f285191f50b49c799c07d6b8f7477a66b457942.png\"][/img]
I\'m also deeply humbled to reveal that the game is an official selection for the Aesthetica Game Lab at the Aesthetica Short Film Festival 2025, and for the 2025 Game Devs of Color Expo . Being at GDoC is a dream - to even think that making a game was possible for someone like me is a direct result of the spaces they\'ve built.
[p align=\"start\"]Until next week, thanks for following along![/p][p align=\"start\"]\n Playtime: 40-60 minutes\n Free on Steam\n Steam Deck-compatible\n Any reviews, ratings, wishlists or shares appreciated![/p]Minimum Setup
- OS: Ubuntu 16.04+
- Processor: 2.0 Ghz 64-bit Intel-compatibleMemory: 2 GB RAM
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: OpenGL 3.0
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