Don’t Get Your Hopes Up is a 45-60 minute game about housing shortage and horror in architecture. Based on my own desperate apartment searches undertaken in 2022 and 2024, and drawing from a half decade of research, conversations and analysis about Amsterdam’s housing crisis, the game moves between fiction, documentary, autobiography, 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.

Structurally, what starts as a traditional visual novel becomes something weirder, as the game constantly undermines player expectations and subverts the traditional visual novel structure with changes in style, tone, and gameplay mechanisms. The game shifts illustration styles to reflect its message, teasing out parallax worlds and illuminating hidden geographies through the use of mediums like architectural drawings, exhibition flyers, slide decks and colonial-era botanical drawings.

The game attempts to tell a wayward history of contemporary Amsterdam, one that has evaded archival capture and lurks at the edges of collective memory. It is, following Lavinia Greenlaw, an “exploded essay” accrued from years of notes and observations. In its bricolage, it attempts to distill fleeting perceptions of an ambient present into coherent yet unsettling images – providing a clarity on which activism and political engagement can be built.