The coolest game of the year is the Kickstarter demo
Staff selection
In addition to our 2021 Major Game Awards, every member of the PC Gamer team has focused on the games they love this year. For the rest of this month, we will release the new employee draft and our main awards.
What’s unparalleled is that, without a doubt, this is the most original and cool thing I’ve seen all year.It won’t be in 2023 At the earliest, This anime-filled rhythmic adventure just ended its Kickstarter event in the spring. But to ease the painful waiting, developer D-Cell released two demos-first a simple Arcade Mix of some game songs, and then the elusive and more complete White Label.
Readers, the white label may be the hardest game presentation in years.
Frankly speaking, I have never seen a developer as dedicated to aesthetics as D-Cell. Unbeatable oscillates under the gold standard of Kickstarter trailers. It is an effortlessly smooth tone that allows you to immediately understand the content of the game without giving up its animation style inspired by Studio Trigger.
Unparalleled, because it now exists in the white label, which is a very streamlined thing. A series of rhythm tracks can hit your gamepad, with a very loose narrative framework, including a tutorial to get a good understanding of what the more adventurous aspects of the game might look like in the final game. There is only one stage, a railway station platform, with each track exploding in the noisy lights and noise.
In the beginning, this noise was almost overwhelming. The screen swings from left to right, you throw notes from all directions, and the camera pulls in and out of each fresh verse and twitches at strange angles. But, like all the best rhythm games, all the extra noise will disappear until it’s just you and the beat. Except for the thumping rhythm and the scorching white notes, your eyes and ears will filter out everything-but when the camera pulls directly in and tilts a long two-track chord, you will feel that you are the coolest people.
As a demonstration, White Label is excellent. It started soon, showing you the full content of Unbeatable, and there are enough tracks for you to chase high scores while waiting to complete the game. But White Label is more than just a demo—it has been adding new tracks, new modes, and new story segments in the past year.
At this point, Unbeatable has crossover songs with No Straight Roads, NOISZ STΔRLIVHT and Rhythm Doctor. D-Cell is providing customized, additional, additional difficulty modes for game tracks.There is an amazing live concert including Anime rock cover by Sayonara Wild Hearts. A few months ago, I launched White Label and found that a short narrative introduction has become a pull-out opening crawl Leaving Scott Pilgrim straight away.
Despite these additions, the white label is still very easy on any direct plot. Instead, we focused our attention on our absolutely exhausted heroine Beat. A short opening gave us a taste of the open world proposed by Unbeatable. Let us hang out on the street and chat with the band members. For example, they were a little angry at how late we practiced.
But apart from a brief epilogue, most of White Label’s scene settings are carried out in short episodes before and after each track. We learn more about who Beat is, talk about her anxiety and her relationship with others, herself, and her music. Each piece is given a background in her life-fashionable sampling beats with appropriate rhythms call for tragic piano lessons, and the waiting heavy improvisations reflect her lifetime aversion to punctuality.
This is a promise to transcend style. I am now really happy to join Beat on this absurd adventure, through a world where music is illegal and we can sin. The final game promises us a complete city to explore the surrounding countryside, an open adventure with shops, stations and streets, a complete day/night cycle, and a large number of locals and mandatory video game errands to help run.
I hope it will be filled with the same down-to-earth and sincere heart that we saw in the short episode of White Label. But even if the presentation has more style than substance, I only need this style to keep repeating in Unbeatable’s killer playlist.
White Label already has a life of its own. As a completely free demo, if you don’t watch this bloody cool rhythm demo, you will do a lot of harm to yourself. But in the end, it doesn’t matter how many new things are added to White Label, when I know I will continue to work overtime in pursuit of perfect running Waiting.