Get Don't Get Your Hopes Up for PC

Don't Get Your Hopes Up is a short interactive comic about housing shortages and horror in architecture. Through a blend of fiction, documentary and social commentary, it follows Krish and Yan, a couple searching for an apartment in Amsterdam over the course of a week. The story draws on apartment searches in 2022 and 2024 and conversations about Amsterdam’s housing crisis over half a decade.

Apartment hunting

You view unusual apartments and make difficult choices about renting and overbidding. The visual-novel gameplay uses sparse, parallax comic-book illustrations, with narrative and mechanical twists. A playthrough takes about 40–60 minutes.

The story explores precarity, solidarity, alienation and the systems that keep people apart. It reflects on the housing crisis through a history of contemporary Amsterdam, with ideas and commentary intended to resonate more widely. Its unsettling perspective questions the promise of abundance and portrays a sense of home that remains out of reach.

Music and influences

The game features a propulsive soundscape with music by Simon Frank and a track by Rotterdam band Neighbours Burning Neighbours. Its inspirations include Leila Taylor’s Sick Houses, Joshua Comaroff and Ker-Shing Ong’s Horror in Architecture, and Ayşegül Savaş’ The Anthropologists.