For vide games, the mid-90s was an era that had a lot of visual creativity that came about by embracing technical limitations, and its a graphics style that indie story-driven rhythm game Unbeatable takes inspiration from.
During the sixth console generation, which began with the Dreamcast, I often thought to myself, 'the dream of realistic visuals were within reach' and that games would never look better.
That may have seemed the case with the likes of Shenmue (also voted in a recent BAFTA poll as the most influential game of all time), even more so with the first Resident Evil remake or Star Wars: Rogue Leader on the GameCube (reminds yourself in June when you can play GameCube Classics on Switch 2).
So to find a new game that embraces the style of 90s games while pushing new, current ideas is something to champion. Unbeatable feels fresh.
"I'm not a huge proponent or fan of chasing the biggest trends in graphics technology, I've always been drawn specifically from that [Dreamcast] era of video games, things that leaned more heavily on trying to make something appealing aesthetically, that was playing into the limitations that the consoles had at the time," the game's art director Andrew Tsai tells me.
An indie game that recalls the 90s
Which isn't to say that Unbeatable's anime-inspired animation isn't stunning in its own regard, which also taps into a modern trend of indie games made with hand-drawn art and animation.
What makes the visuals even more compelling is that while rhythm games usually involve beat-matching incoming notes on a chart that overlays the other visuals, you're actually in control of your character Beat as she attacks incoming objects in real-time almost like a character action game.
"Context is super important for us," Andrew says. "It's really important that the players have reasons and emotional justifications for the music that they're experiencing and that all of this sort of feeds together into a cohesive whole. Music is such an emotional art form and yet so many rhythm games forego any kind of emotional attachment to the song itself for the sake of very plainly presenting a challenge to you."
Unbeatable nonetheless still offers that pure rhythm gameplay experience via an arcade mode, but what also makes its package is being able to walk around, talk to people, and take part in other rhythm-based mini-games, which include punching cops and then running away from them (did I mention this is set in a world where music is illegal and you do crimes?).
It's also in these moments when it becomes apparent this isn't just hand-drawn sprites played on a 2D plane but also with explorable 3D environments, except the characters are still just 2D sprites.
According to Andrew, it's a very intentional clash of styles that also evokes a lot of techniques used in anime in the late 90s and early 00s, citing Blood: The Last Vampire as one example.
"What they ended up with is these really lavishly animated characters and these very overtly 3D plainly shaded models that kind of stick out a little bit – there's a stylistic mismatch there that I've always found really interesting," he explains.
"Unbeatable is very much not hiding the fact that it has 3D environments and not at all trying to blend the characters within them, but make both of them stand out on their own merits," adds Andrew.
Although it began as a Kickstarter project back in 2021, the studio D-Cell has also grown in size, as Andrew describes Unbeatable as a mid-sized indie production with around 30 people, with a sizable portion dedicated towards its animation.
"There's a lot of animation in this game. Every time we make a new mechanic, it is a whole host of additional animations that we have to draw by hand. There is a lot of love and care being put into every single mechanic that you play through."
A clever indie dev hack
As painstaking as that sounds, there are also techniques that help save time when it comes to building the assets. TexturePacker, for example, is a tool that's been useful getting sprite sheets as compressed as possible so that they can be loaded into memory without issue for say 4K resolutions.
It also meant keeping the 3D environment models as simple as possible, which incidentally stays true to the ethos of emulating an aesthetic that embraces limitations.
"Our 3D models very rarely have any kind of textures on them, for the most part they're built simply using vertex colours and this sort of dynamic paint stroke material that gives the illusion of more detail," Andrew explains, which he says is actually a similar technique used by indie exploration adventure game Caravan SandWitch released just last year.
"We sort of stumbled into this technique independently from each other, but making this game without textures and not having to worry about properly UV-mapping your 3D models is a huge timesaver for us," Andrew reflects.
Unbeatable is due to be released sometime in 2025 for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, but in the meantime you can also try out a new demo via Steam.
