Don't Get Your Hopes Up

DEMO VERSION - MARCH 2025
A videogame by:  Krish Raghav
With music by:  Simon Frank

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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 wooncrisis, 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.

DEMO AVAILABLE NOW

A 20-minute demo of Don't Get Your Hopes Up , covering the first 1/3rd of the game, is now available to play in-browser or as download (PC/Mac, recommended) below. The full game will be released in Summer 2025. 

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, and  _ess_'s Cookie Clicker code. 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.

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All feedback and comments welcome - I'd love to hear what you think!