Game EXP: Unreachable (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Unreachable through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

Unreachable

Systems: Windows, Linux

Release Date: January 27, 2025

Publisher: Lost Art Studios

Developer: Lost Art Studios

Time Spent: 5 Hours

[Trigger Warning:  This game involves audible scenes of the murder of a minor.  Within the game, there can be audible scenes where a minor is beaten or shot, although there is no discernable difference, from what I could tell, between the adult and the minor being killed.  These scenes happen over a radio so there are no visuals, but even the audio some audiences might find disturbing]

Where do I start with Unreachable?

Well, if you haven't already, you can start by watching my playthrough of the series here:

Unreachable [A Stage Select Start Playthrough].  There are four videos covering the entire game.  Well, the "entire" game through the one particular ending that I got, which I believe is one of three possible endings.

There is a lot that is good in this game, with a couple of things that are bad and/or hampered the game a bit.  The good definitely outweighs the bad though, so if you're looking for the tl;dr, it's that Unreachable was a pretty good game that felt mostly successful in what it set out to do.  I will preface that I played this on the Steam Deck and there were a couple of issues likely related to the fact that the game was not designed or optimized with the Steam Deck in mind.  Such as, there are at least two times in the game where you are required to type on a live keyboard, not an in-game keyboard [although this could be (somehow?) to make the game controller-compatible and likely "Steam Deck Playable] with one instance essentially soft-locking me from being able to complete the good ending of the game; or maybe the good-bad ending instead of just the bad-bad ending.  There were also several instances where I had to pause the game to go into the controller settings to either update or create new keybindings because again, this game wasn't designed with a controller in mind.  There's good here, punctuated by not-so-good.

Unreachable is mostly a stealth game with psychological-thriller elements and for the most part it excels at both of those genres (except when it doesn't which we'll get to later).  You play the role of Harry Bernes, a cop in rural Smalltown, America who gets pulled into an evening of global espionage against his will after he drives home after a long day at the office to find his young daughter and estranged wife.  The kidnapper leaves a radio that they use to communicate with Officer Bernes throughout the game along with bits of spy equipment that's used in context-specific moments in later chapters.  You are often required to complete tasks within a certain time limit (at the kidnapper's discretion, so there's no actual in-game clock) or they'll call you out on your tardiness, or just straight-up broadcast the murdering of your family as Harry yells into his own microphone.  Harry spends the majority of the game crouched and scurrying around darkened houses, office buildings, cemeteries, and warehouses since running/walking of any kind will draw the attention of local and government authorities who are prowling the area.

Let's go over the few issues with the game that I felt hampered the overall experience.

The biggest issue with Unreachable was how it used cutscenes.  There are times in the game when information needs to be communicated from the kidnapper to Harry, and that is mostly when the cutscenes come into play, but they're not traditional cutscenes where the perspective changes.  These cutscenes all happen when you're in control of Harry until you're not.  In one instance, you're standing in front of a computer to insert a USB drive while two people are patrolling the area.  Once you press [F] to insert the drive, the cutscene starts where the kidnapper and Harry have a conversation about what now needs to happen.  During that whole conversation, you do not have control of the camera, and therefore, nothing bad can happen to you.  You will not be walked in on, you cannot try to find a place to hide if you hear footsteps, you just stand there while being talked to.  Because this isn't the first instance of this happening, the player knows that nothing bad will happen to Harry during this sequence and because nothing bad can happen, there is no tension, because if something bad does happen, it was supposed to happen, not something that you could avoid.  Every time this happens in the game, it's during a moment when Harry is audibly worried about being caught and thinks he should do something different besides stand around, but to the player, it's just another cutscene to patiently sit through.

Significantly less important, was the hitbox, for lack of a better term, used for objects you had to click on.  More often than not, what you needed to click on, be it a pair of earbuds or a car door handle was literally the exact outline of that object.  Earbuds are not large objects so getting the single dot reticle exactly over where the earbuds were often felt like an exercise in preciseness that I was not excited about.  Maybe it's an in-game way of trying to create and amplify a feeling of stress and anxiety, like Harry's fumbling with his keys, or can't quite grab a hold of the car handle on the first go?  Just speculation of course.

There were two short-lived mechanics that I had issues with on a couple of levels.  The first was the focus mechanic in Chapter 2 where you had to zoom in (the default was to press and hold the R Joystick), but I had to remap the button to the L shoulder button.  A short-lived mechanic that came up in Chapter 4: Lucky Cemetary, was the night vision goggles.  The goggles themselves worked fine and the visuals were fine as well, but once enemies were introduced in the second half of the stage and an all-of-a-sudden battery mechanic kicked in that chapter became frustrating.  Because of each of the different elements at this point in the chapter: the maze-like paths of the cemetery, the multiple patrolling enemies, the obscuring nature of fog, and the player trying to figure out what a "clue" would be in the cemetery without any additional hints, means that you're going to be doing a lot of wandering.  Wandering in the fog while avoiding enemies means you're going to need to put on the night vision goggles to make sure that you're not about to walk into the path of an enemy, and when you check for enemies before you move out of a hiding spot.  Using a stopwatch, I figured out that there's roughly only 60 seconds of battery life and at that point, the only real thing to do is to get yourself killed just so that you can get a recharged battery.  Considering that one of the game's selling points is the tension that builds when you're in this situation, having a mechanic that makes it literally impossible to complete the level in a single run feels pretty bad.  And now even knowing where all of the clues are in the chapter, I don't think it would be possible to complete this chapter on a single battery charge, even using the battery sparingly.  This then requires the player to find a clue, maybe two if they're lucky, then get themselves caught/killed just to have another go with a fully charged battery.  Which then brings up something good to talk about.

One of the key mechanics in Unreachable is the clue system that requires Harry to find a certain number of clues in each chapter in order to progress the story, like finding four clues in the cemetery before you can leave and move on to the next chapter.  Sometimes the time required to find the clues is hidden behind an in-game timer with the kidnapper becoming frustrated if Harry isn't moving fast enough, while others trigger the kidnapper to tell Harry that he's finished with that particular area and that he can move on.  Thankfully the devs have given the player a bit of leeway in the collection and retainment of these clues in that if you're caught/killed/family is killed, any clues that you had collected up until that point, still count as collected, even if you restart from the last checkpoint 5 minutes prior.  This saving of clues even if you die is a proverbial godsend because specifically in Chapter 4: Lucky Cemetary, this would have been a stopping point for me if I were required to collect each clue every time I was caught/killed.

The document and "photographic memory" mechanic I also really enjoyed, coupled with how the games doesn't do any kind of handholding in terms of solving puzzles.  Knowing what email address to use in Chapter 3 and the answer to the security question were great.  I also didn't mind the overabundance of clues and red herrings either as it made the characters and world feel more fleshed out than had there been highlighted sections in documents that pointed to only important information.  Being able to solve a puzzle on your own is infinitely more satisfying than following a walkthrough.  While in the police station, I thought I would need information from a Morse code transcript until I realized that that was probably being too thorough and stopped a few words in; this wasn't Jericho after all.  That being said, I did get stuck on the final puzzle, where you had to know what code name to enter into the pager to start the process of calling out for help.  Part of giving up on that puzzle though was due to issues with the Steam Deck closing down the pager interface every time I pressed a key on the virtual keyboard, something that didn't happen while typing on the computer in the police station.

I'm not overly upset that I wasn't able to do better than the bad-bad ending as it's not like I was able to solve the final puzzle, even if the game hadn't been buggy when using the Steam Deck's virtual keyboard.  So it wasn't entirely a soft-lock issue.  Not entirely anyway.  Disappointed, sure, but that's not going to overshadow the rest of the game.  I also appreciated that the game wasn't so long that the novelty of the whole experience began to wane, but was a satisfying amount of time; even with all of the times I was caught in both the police station and the cemetery.  The highs were pretty high, and the lows were frustrating, but not rage-quitting frustrating low.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
That Starts to Grow