Don't Get Your Hopes Up

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 visual novel 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.