Don't Get Your Hopes Up

DEMO  / PROTOTYPE VERSION - MARCH 2025
FULL RELEASE COMING SOON!

A videogame by:  Krish Raghav
With music by:  Simon Frank
& Neighbours Burning Neighbours

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You're looking for a new apartment in Amsterdam. 

Your once-confident search is morphing into panic. 
Nothing is available. Anything will do. 
Anything. 

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 woningnood, 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.

EVERYTHING HAS TO CHANGE, FOR ANYTHING TO STAY THE SAME

Don’t Get Your Hopes Up 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, the comic attempts to distill fleeting perceptions of an ambient present into coherent yet unsettling images.

Through Krish’s sparse illustrations, the Amsterdam housing crisis takes on an eerie non-human energy. Precarity, alienation, and monotony decay into unsettling horror as the gap between fantasy and reality grows. The relentless propulsion and staccato bass lines of Simon’s music recall EBM and seamier strains of Benelux synth pop, but the work sidesteps the fantasies of power that often define these genres, opting instead for deflated self-deprecation and protagonists cracking under the pressure of a harsh urban environment.

Inspired by Leila Taylor’s Sick Houses, Joshua Comaroff and Ker-Shing Ong’s Horror in Architecture, and Ayşegül Savaş’ The Anthropologists, Don’t Get Your Hopes Up brings “state-of-the-art maleficence” to a seemingly never-ending crisis. 

FULL VERSION COMING SOON
Prototype playable now - If possible, please use the downloadable version below over the browser-based version. The downloaded games will, sadly, produce security warnings in Windows 11 if you have SmartScreen enabled. You can safely ignore these warnings. 

YOUR OWN STORIES

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 you’d like to share, I’d also love to hear your own stories of housing precarity – wherever you may be in the world. You can reach me via email (mailto link). 

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This project uses, with credit, elements from Wattson's Ren'Py Kinetic Text Tags, Nighten's yet another phone, Zeil Learning's Horizontal Menu, wulfmune's navigation arrows guide, Feniks' Zoom Viewport,  ess_'s Cookie Clicker and Flashlight code, and ChevyRay's Pixel Fonts. Huge thanks to these wonderful creators and the Ren'Py community. The final section of the demo uses "Crowd talking in Restaurant Eye, Amsterdam by hz37" under a Creative Commons license. "Familiar Place" by Neighbours Burning Neighbours is used with permission under ISRC code NL-2SY-24-00002.