unbeatable was probably one of my most anticipated games... ever. i found out about it just a bit after the kickstarter, and kept thinking about it every now and then. i had my fun with [white label], and spent the past few years waiting (and waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting for you).
and then the trailers came out. insane breakneck pace of cool animated stuff happening, perfectly edited to the absolute banger of a soundtrack this game has, showing this badass girl beating the crap out of corrupt cops and doing the sickest stunts you've ever seen. and it was clearly gameplay. i rewatched the first re-announcement trailer so many times. and then the demo trailer. so many times.
and then the demo came out. and it was... chill.
a very calm game. you do, in fact, beat up a few cops. but mostly, you run around talking to your friends. hanging out, talking about how pointless it is to put a yield sign in the middle of a field, doing bartending minigames and getting pelted by baseballs that don't care about trivial things like time signatures, taking picture to reminisce of the past (but time has moved on, and things can never be like the past again).
that was when i knew, with 100% certainty, that this game would be my game of the year.
the demo was the exact opposite of the insane pedal-to-the-metal rhythm action game about taking down the oppressive police state that i had expected... and it was PERFECT.
so then, fast forward to november, and the game's release date... no wait. december, actually. and the full game comes out (no more waiting, i'm done waiting), and i get my hands on it, like many others.
if you haven't played it yet, i strongly recommend you go do that, but i cannot promise that you will enjoy it. unbeatable, depending on who plays it, how their life is going, and how it resonates with them, can either be a life-changing game or a wet paper towel. it reaches across the screen, grabs you by the shoulders and yells its message in your face. if its message is not something you care for, it might not land. but if it is, DAMN.
everything in the foldouts will be spoilers, so don't click them unless you have played the game already. even if you're the "i don't really care about spoilers" kind of people. ESPECIALLY if you're "i don't really care about spoilers" kind of people. (i went to look at the content warnings because there was one specific place i was worried it might go, and i wish i hadn't looked at the content warnings. and they were nowhere NEAR the level of spoilers as what i'm talking about here.)
if you're not sold on the game and you need someone to tell you, in relatively vague terms, what the game is about, you can maybe click the first one. i still think you shouldn't though.
unbeatable is a game about music being illegal and doing crimes.
but unbeatable is also a game about so many other things.
it is a game about structures of oppression, and what perpetuates them. about believing that you can change the system by becoming part of it. about apathy, and joining the system because you don't really care to do anything else. about perpetuating the system because it simply aligns with your beliefs. about the simple, raw cruelty and thirst for power that lives at the top. about being misled into helping it, believing that what you are doing is for the greater good. about propaganda, and how sometimes, things are only powerful because of the fear we have of them.
it is a game about lesbians, a little bit at least.
it is a game about grief, about dealing with loss, about the pain of leaving things unsaid, about the regret of saying the wrong things. about bonds and trust, and found family. it is a game about moving forward, about taking accountability for yourself, about showing the person that you were 7 years ago that you have grown and changed, hopefully for the better. about how this change, this growth has to come from YOU, even if there are people to help along the way. about how certain people will stick with you forever, no matter how far away they are.
it is a game about creating. about how music is everywhere and everything, about art and how it allows us to express ourselves. about how unthinkable a world without it would be, and about how oppressors view said "art"; as something that just needs to be aesthetically pleasing, technically impressive, and devoid of any deeper meaning.
it is a game that will force me to answer "i can't tell you what my favorite isekai is because that would be a spoiler".
and it is a game about so many more things that i may not have caught on my first playthrough,
yes. that is a lot of things for a thing to be about. if you haven't played the game, in which case why are you reading this, i warned you not to read this before playing the game, go play the game right now, you might think "how can it be about all these things? doesn't that make it really messy? isn't that too many messages?"
yes. absolutely. it is SO messy. so many ideas and themes are weaved together into an absolute mess of a story that only begins to REALLY make sense 3 hours after the end credits, when you start thinking about things.
this next part is just a bunch of unfiltered thoughts. cool stuff from throughout the game that i just really wanted to talk about.
what follows is REAL spoilers.
when taking photos of quaver to replicate her parents' pictures. the controls are jank, and it is kinda hard to line up the photo. but mostly, it is impossible to get the picture EXACTLY right no matter what you do, because beat isn't standing in the same place and the aspect ratio is different and the environment has changed and quaver isn't eve and her dad isn't there and so on. but you still do it. quaver isn't standing in the same place at all, there are cop posters everywhere, the atmosphere is melancholic. it is not the same photo at all. time has passed, the world has changed. it CANNOT be the same photo, the moment captured by the original photo no longer exists. and that's fine. the moment captured by the new photo is just as meaningful.
when you're in episode 4. and penny is OBVIOUSLY not acting with the band's best interests at heart. when she turns the high energy song about hating cops (among other things) into AI chill beats to oppress minorities to. when she makes beat come to the studio that has a dampener in it (which beat has repeatedly said makes her exhausted and gives her headaches). the studio with a HARM-branded roomba in it, and then there's that one shot of her behind the "HARM Line Do Not Cross" tape. the way she talks about not understanding why people feel like they have to create stuff. and then beat just... goes along with it. the vibes are rancid, everything is sus, and yet... she goes along with it. "why would she do that? why does she care so much about being the one to do this album?" and then the final episode hits and you get it. it makes sense. her relationship with her previous bandmates, her desire to not be abandoned (even though unbeatable would never do that), along with penny's manipulation... it makes sense. "why would she do that?" because when you're scared of seeing the past repeat itself, you stop thinking. beat's original struggle was taking personal responsibility, and here comes penny, going "don't worry, just do what i'm telling you to do and everything will be fixed".
episode 6 (or, i should say, UNBEATABLE THE MOVIE). beat's mental state. her relationship with her mother, with her sister, with her... "bandmates". the way each character represents a pillar of HARM's oppression, but also a trait that beat is personally struggling with - apathy, a feeling that everything will be always if you just keep going, that one day someone will fix it... and, also, just a little bit of self-destructiveness. among other things. the way she confronts them, one by one, showing that she HAS grown over the time she spent with quaver, treble, and clef. the way it all culminates into the bookend song.
the way the details behind the silence and moment zero remain somewhat vague. my read was that the silence always existed, but since they were never feared or understood to be any specific thing, they didn't manifest. the silence that showed up on stage may have been created by rest's feelings for eve, or the whole band's intense emotions at the time, or the audience... maybe all of the above, maybe even with some encouragement from sforzando and her machines. but that silence was nothing, until that cop shot eve, and now suddenly people feared it, giving it the shape that it has, which in turn gave HARM a perfect excuse to set up their police state. or maybe i'm completely wrong about all this.
the "real world" segments. the beautiful hand drawn skybox that is replaced with a literal photo of clouds.png. the desaturated colors, the way everything is suddenly grounded and realistic and grey and drab and kind of boring... but also blurry and hazy and covered in that trippy texture / vertex distortion effect that gives it a slightly dreamlike and non-real quality.
in short. unbeatable is a game that is powerful and dense in meaning. maybe a bit too dense and, at times, rough and unpolished; but that's fine. i don't even know if it would really benefit from that much more polish. (i guess i could do without the softlocks, some of the fights might need a little bit of a warning before they start and jumpscare you with a cop, and the camera during a certain jumping minigame may have been a bit counterproductive.)
unbeatable is the result of a team of creative people expressing what they had to express, in the form they chose. i could nitpick the camera and the controls and some of the transitions and the colliders. but that would be like me having the best dinner of my whole life and then complaining that there was no chocolate dessert.
sure, yeah, that's true, there was no chocolate dessert, and i love chocolate. but i had the best dinner of my whole life, so this one time, i guess i'll do without chocolate dessert.