Don't Get Your Hopes Up
Release date: Sep 16, 2025
Developers: Krish Raghav
Publishers: Krish Raghav
Genres: Adventure, Free To Play
Categories: Single-player, Steam Achievements, Camera Comfort, Color Alternatives, Custom Volume Controls, Mouse Only Option, Narrated Game Menus, Playable without Timed Input, Save Anytime, Subtitle Options, Steam Cloud
Supported languages: English

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 .  

Press reviews: “Don't Get Your Hopes Up is a good game because not only is it good commentary on the (many, worldwide) housing crisis (especially how those intersect with racism and the climate crisis), it also understands that yes, I probably would rent a flat that contained an exact replica of itself in dollhouse form, complete with a little doll me, and inside that replica another replica of another flat, another future, spiralling in on itself forever. Housing market's in shambles isn't it.” regicidal-defenestration, Tumblr “A deeply engaging, vital, eye-opening piece of work, chock-full of empathy and critical thinking.” 4/5 – So Many Games “I had a hard time finding a single sentence in this thing I didn't want to screenshot...do dig in.” Rock Paper Shotgun