Have you ever played a game that you know is for someone, somewhere…but not you? That’s how I’d describe Unbroken: I have no doubt it’ll be a GOTY candidate for somebody, but I can’t make heads or tails of it.
The best way I can describe it isn’t to compare it to other games at all. Years ago, in another life before I got back into gaming, I was obsessively into music, and I wrote about all kinds of bands that fell under the catch-all term of indie rock. Unbroken reminds me of all the droning, atonal, dissonant bands I ever heard – and I don’t necessarily mean that in a negative way. It evokes genres like shoegaze, or lo-fi, or anti-folk, or no wave punk, or any number of other subgenres that often actively tried to repel people away as much as they could.
Obviously, the comparison between an audio medium and a visual one isn’t exactly 1:1. But Unbroken undeniably lives in the same general space. It drops you down into its ugly, nightmarish world with barely any explanation (notwithstanding plenty of explanatory notes that try and tell you what to do), and every so often throws insane levels of violence at you and expects you to keep up by grabbing whatever weapon you can and mowing down your enemies.
In a broad sense, you might be able to compare Unbroken to a game like Doom, or Shadow Warrior, or whatever other first-person shooter you can think of where you’re expected to keep moving and kill everything. But those games have a certain level of polish to them that Unbroken doesn’t have – and likely never will have, even making allowances for the fact the game is still in Early Access, because it really feels like a response to things like that.
I read someone else describe the experience of playing Unbroken as being akin to getting dropped into someone else’s mid-game save with no prior knowledge of what that other person was playing, and, honestly, that’s probably the best way I can think of to explain it. Unbroken is a weird, violent experience – but again, if you’re a very specific kind of gamer, I could see it being an absolute revelation.
MGP Studios provided us with an Unbroken PC code for review purposes.
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