Just wasn't that fun.

We tried it for a couple hours one time, it was just sort of boring, haven't touched it for over six months.

Sometimes that's all there is to it. I can't find a reason to play it.

So there's this moment, right at the start of the game - the story mode, specifically - where... "The Dev"(?) asks you some stuff, introduces you to the game. UNBEATABLE is my first rhythm game (unless we count Yakuza 0), and when I respond to The Dev with this I'm met first with disbelief, and... then the words: "I'm honoured". I think it was in this moment, this gentle pseudo-conversation with whichever member of D-Cell typed out the words for the intro, that I fell in love with the game.

UNBEATABLE is, in honesty, deserving of two reviews. As a conversation, as a piece of art, as something *created*, it's... Look I won't say it's perfect, but it's unfair for me to not give it the level of analysis and critique that a steam review doesn't have the character limit for. So let me keep this part brief:

UNBEATABLE has not struck me as an exemplar of storytelling. I think in many ways the way the story frames itself - with a group of young adults (and a twelve year old) who fight The System through self-expression and non-conformity - is... somewhere between a little tired and a little immature. It's not Persona 5 "Rotten Adults" levels, but its statements on oppression, resistance, fascism, etc don't ever really grow into anything especially meaningful. I don't want to say UNBEATABLE plays it safe, but if you're down with hitting a cop in a video game, I don't think you'll feel very *politically challenged* by its messaging and themes.
The characters are also not especially fleshed-out - while I thoroughly enjoyed my time with everyone in the story (even the people I didn't *like*), I'm not going to claim they have any notable depth to them. Beat and Quaver get by far the most love, and even then, you won't be drowning in the vastness of their souls or anything.

However. At the start of the game, The Dev told me "this isn't a love story." And I knew, instantly, that that was a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lie. UNBEATABLE is an ode to art, to the act of creating something, of being PART of something. UNBEATABLE is dripping, from the very moment you launch it, with such care and passion and effort. It doesn't really matter what the characters say to each other as individuals, or what The Dev singularly says to me at the start, or the specifics of the world it chooses to exist within. I don't think any of those carry much meaning at all in isolation. What *matters* is how UNBEATABLE is screaming at me with the pain and joy and fear of exposing one's heart to another, just to share in it. Isn't that love?

If you care about... making things; if you've ever agonised over if you're doing this for yourself or for other people; if you've ever made something that's ♥♥♥♥, or embarrassing - or, hell, good AND embarrassing - then I think you'll hear something that UNBEATABLE is trying to say to you. Whether or not it'll be worth anything to you, I don't know. But it's been worth something to me.

---

Okay, with that out of the way, part two of the review. Where things get ugly.

Firstly, this game has a serious issue with loading screens. The number of times I missed the first beat of a track because I was still in a loading screen is (if you'll allow the wordplay) UNACCEPTABLE. I really don't know why it would be coded this way, but it's frustrating.

Secondly, I was *really* hurting for a lack of save-files, and the opportunity to replay segments where I'd clearly missed something. Soft-crashes and hung loading screens were not infrequent, and while the game saves regularly, it did suck to have to replay sections multiple times. Not only that, but I *really* took my time with the story mode (12 hours of it), and I still missed a significant amount of the stuff in my journal. I don't want to just button smash my way through to see stuff for the sake of it, but again, replaying stuff quickly becomes a chore when you can't cut out the parts you don't want to do.

Thirdly, and related to point #2, a large number of the game's mechanics are just not explained. the "learn as you go" style works for a lot of things, *not* here. I think it took me until the end of the game to understand how to dodge bullets. I STILL don't know how the time progression works. It is aggravating to *know* I missed content I wanted to see just because I didn't understand a mechanic that was never explained to me. I don't even know why a day/night cycle *exists* in this game, it feels so out of place! And keep in mind, I was playing mostly on Beginner/Normal, I specifically wanted an experience friendly to someone who has never tried this genre before.

(This is also where I'd like to request a way to play the bartending minigame forever, pls&ty)

Fourthly, don't know if it's a client-side issue, but I did notice the game struggled with rapid inputs - specifically, with not registering the second input if it was too soon relative to the first. This was most apparent in the jump-rope minigame, but did also come up a couple of times towards the end of the campaign.

I could keep going, but I hope this sort of drives home my point: for all the charm, and the style, and the *love* that has gone into UNBEATABLE, I have encountered so many things that should have been found in QA without me even particularly trying. A whole scale of bugs/glitches that range from largely just amusing to literally game-breaking, a number of areas where the game feels obscure and obtuse, even just like... basic stuff. Typos. ♥♥♥♥ like that.

And yet, for all its issues, none of them were severe enough to get me to not want to play. I have undeniably had FUN. It has left me wanting more, in a way that defies the conclusion of the story.

So I recommend it. Maybe you want to wait for a few patches that smooth some of the rough edges, but I think this is art made with a little bit of dirt mixed in. I don't think it will ever be perfectly clean. I don't think it should be. But I'm REALLY glad I didn't pass this one up.

The top review right now has a massive number of reactions, and a decent number of comments, and for good reason; the truth is that Krafton as a company sucks, and James should have taken more care in who he threw his weight behind when it came to his game.
To clarify, I refuse to touch this game in any capacity since the partnership with Krafton, for the following reasons:

While James is still the developer, any further purchases related to the game have the money split between himself and Krafton - that's how a partnership works - and I simply don't believe that every small indie dev is a divine gift from heaven and should be treated like their work is pure gold. I am not of the opinion that giving Krafton money is a sensible decision just because some other guy I don't know would also get money at the same time. Even just continuing to be a player, outside of Krafton's tendency to take as much personal data as it possibly can, will make their numbers look better to stakeholders - and I'd just rather not be part of that.
Krafton treat their employees poorly, operate as a ruthless business (perfectly predictable) and have an *incredibly* dodgy record when it comes to data acquisition, retention, and privacy. I appreciate the average bot knows only "world bad, suck it up buttercup", but some of us are actual adults with fully formed prefrontal cortices, and throwing your own online safety - as well as your moral values, if you've bothered to develop any - under the bus because... idk, gotta lick those boots somehow? I guess? farm some online clout with a sick burn and a clown award? is just sort of silly.
Krafton is valued at US$20B. If you think they're just "helping out" a small indie dev, then I'm asking you to politely consider the alternative; that they see an opportunity to relentlessly expand their market influence, and James Bendon is just the latest to fall for it. But that's his business now.

Notice under that review, by the way, the comments are talking about all kinds of "sides", and... whatever. They're clearly bot comments that mostly aren't referring to the review, and considering the sheer number of them it's entirely possible Krafton bought those comments themselves as part of their role "marketing" the game. What kind of real human being asks someone to turn their review into a positive one? That's literally only done by a marketing team. But I digress.

As an actual game, Dinkum is... a 6/10? At best? It's fine, never quite grabbed me the same way titles like Animal Crossing Wild World or Stardew Valley did. The need for manually clicking every interaction, the way progress felt pretty slow, the *horrendous* gameplay loop when mining - it was cute, sure! fun for a bit, definitely not a "bad" game by any means, but I never found myself thinking "I can't wait to play Dinkum again!"
All the mechanics are just a little bit too tedious, all the challenges just a little bit too simple, all the systems just a little bit too unpolished. I probably wouldn't have bothered leaving a review and would've just quietly dropped the game, content that I at least gave it a go, and unphased that I never really explored anywhere close to everything it had to offer.

I can definitely see what some people have fallen for; I think if it'd been a little more ironed out I would feel a lot more sorrow leaving it behind. But oh well, probably for the best all things considered. Only buy it now if you're fine with the direction that Krafton will guide it.

Dinkum is a perfectly "Okay" game, with a dev that decided to partner with one of the most reviled contemporary publishers you can find.

After playing the demo I was genuinely really excited to buy the full version of Let Them Trade when it released; in fact, after I missed the actual release day I was actually annoyed at myself for not remembering. The demo presented a really interesting and compelling idea; what about a standard city builder/economy sim that had a focus on replayability and a laissez-faire approach to difficulty? There are already many options for puzzle-based or challenging games in this genre, so what about the opposite?

Having bought the full version, giving it a decent go, and letting myself sit on my thoughts for a few days before making a formal judgement, I've identified my two main areas of frustration with this game, and why I feel disappointed after enjoying the demo so much.

Firstly, the mechanical; Let Them Trade has marketed itself as a cozy, non-puzzle entry into the genre - and as I mentioned before, that is a sincere plus to me. It is not meant to have the complexity of Victoria 3, or the difficulty of FrostPunk. However, the game is still... *lacking*.
The campaign attempts to introduce you to more mechanics and resources over time, but also allows you to basically "complete" the game from the first level; you can choose to continue playing a level even after you beat your Mission, and all the resources are available in all the levels, so it's entirely possible to see everything the game has to offer from the very start.
The Missions themselves also don't offer much variation as you progress through the campaign; you pretty much have to do the exact same steps every time, but on *this* mission you need 50 bread instead of 70 wood! wow! Keeping in mind, again, you were... always capable of just getting bread on the first level.
This availability of resources from the very beginning is also coupled with essentially flat base research at the start of each level, with the need to research and upgrade the standard Peasant buildings many times across the campaign; some levels do start with the player further along, but it never feels like it's by *much*, just a little bit. It'll save you maybe ten minutes, in a game that asks you to play for much, much longer.
Overall, the campaign ends up being overly repetitive because you are required to perform the same steps to complete your mission objective in pretty much the exact same way on every level, with practically identical access to resources, and no meaningful variation in challenge - it's a sandbox, but it's *structured* to make you feel like you have to do those levels in order, with the punishment being that you have to revisit the mechanics and gameplay *again* if you decide to progress independently.

There are also several mechanics that are seemingly designed to just... bog down the player experience. For example, cities have limited numbers of internal transporters and external traders, who deal with acquiring and moving resources between the city centre, trade partners, and production buildings. But they are *really* limited; and the amount they can carry is also *really* limited. You can upgrade these a handful of times, but I've found it barely makes a dent - and while the devs have stated their intent to rework this system, LTT is not an Early Access title. System reworks of this nature on games that are "fully released" are just sort of unacceptable; this should have been found in playtesting.

On top of this, individual cities will slowly accrue vast amounts of wealth; but this becomes largely irrelevant, because the only interaction the player has with this is to take or give 1,000 Gold at a time. If your city has 4k in its budget, and the player takes 1k, it has the *exact same impact* as taking 1k from a city with *40k* in the budget - and it's not possible to take the money any faster, there's a flat 5 minute cooldown *every time*. This means cities are essentially binary; either they have enough money to purchase their required goods from other cities, and the player can take a small portion every five minutes (1), or the cities don't have enough money and the player needs to donate 1k gold to them instead (0). Cities do not build on their own, they do not demand greater autonomy, they do not themselves interact with the player in any way, they just have a large amount of dead cash that sits there literally forever and does nothing.
The over-simplicity in this mechanic, where the player cannot control how much they take to balance happiness and city budget, where the player cannot create artificial inflation by impoverishing a city that is then forced to drive its prices up, where cities do not do anything but subsist with the cash they have, is so hands-off as to be, plainly, boring. It's one thing to see number go up, but it just hit me like a sack of bricks to realise *it didn't matter at all*.

There are other things too; scouting is poorly thought-out and needs to be reworked to be less time-wastey and more interactive; the size of the game board is too small, so even different map layouts end up being similar out of resource necessity; my custom map was Permanently Deleted upon update! Infuriating! But these things can essentially be summed up as: the game feels unfinished. Rushed. I was hopeful to not see yet another Early Access title, but this game needed more time.

Let Them Trade feels like a game I would like my child to play; it feels about the right pace, with the right amount of difficulty, and a visual presentation that works well for a younger audience. However...

Secondly (and I'm really ready to farm the Clown awards from all the Steam users, here); what does Let Them Trade say... *politically*? (gasp).

I've left this one here because I know a lot of people simply won't care, but if you *are* interested then feel free to read on.

Let's address the elephants in the room;
The king is a caricature of a greedy, cowardly monarch. Similarly, every time a city becomes wealthy enough, the mayor will make comments like "this will fund more fountains!" if you give them gold, or "at least let us keep the wine!" when taking it. However, banditry is presented as a purely unsympathetic nuisance - the first bandit you encounter is Big Bad Bob, and he's just some evil shmuck who you're meant to kill (as much as little wooden toys can be killed). The excess of wealth and greed is played for laughs, and it largely works - but the game also makes no attempt to show the harm or origins of poverty, and shies away from presenting anyone other than nasty, evil bandits as being willing to commit crime. Along this same line, every Knight is virtuous and honourable, and every mayor is a wholly good representative of the common folk; there's no depth beyond this, which has the knock-on effect of reinforcing some rather unpleasant stereotypes about class and hierarchy that I don't think it ever really self-examines in the same way that other titles in the genre have. You're not encouraged to think of your citizens as people, just resources to exploit - but that's exactly the same as the king is portrayed. The game is ultimately sympathetic to the very caricatures it attempts to satirise - it's saying "you're like this too, but it doesn't matter."

And finally, I'll just say it: I find it a little odd that literally every character in the game is white. BBC's Merlin released in 2008, and I use it as a benchmark for fictional "medieval-era" media and how it portrays people of colour within the real world - because as much as casual racists like to protest it, black and brown Europeans weren't invented in the 20th century. Any media that has *only* white people, in a Euro-inspired, roughly-medieval portrayal of society, is - intentionally or otherwise - choosing to perpetuate a white-supremacist and ahistorical view of medieval Europe. Merlin is far from perfect with its representation, but at least it *has it*, and it had it twenty years ago.

TLDR: Buy Kind Words 1.

Kind Words 2 is, for all intents and purposes, a $20 expansion to Kind Words that adds a variety of indirect ways of communicating with your fellow players; this comes with two requirements to work. Firstly, you need to have enough people for this to be worth spending four times as much as Kind Words on, and secondly you need those methods to be interesting enough to keep people using them.

Kind Words 2 should have been a replacement-slash-expansion; it should have been something that players could donate to as a way of further supporting the project, but didn't require players to make an initial purchase. Kind Words isn't so much a game as it is a service, or a tool; a means by which people in need can look to others for a bit of support. Kind Words 2 adds *some* game elements to this, but basically none of them are independent. Which means, without a large and stable playerbase, everything is just repetition and largely abandoned.

Your obvious jump will probably be "but not putting all of this behind a paywall isn't financially viable" and... yeah! You're right! Totally! It kind of sucks to an unreasonable degree that not only can I not recommend the game in the first place, but I can't even particularly justify the expense that went into developing it. This is a forum given graphical quality - but it costs too much, so it's a ghost town. Any sense of comfort is lost because it's just so... eerie to be in a space that was clearly meant to be populated, but ultimately isn't. This seems to have been made on a model of "if we believe really hard" and not, like... actual logistics. If I could convince a hundred thousand people to buy a copy right here and now then I would, and the game would be significantly better for it - but that's just not going to happen. The cost to buy-in is too steep, the hype at launch was too little, and after just over six months the game is only dwindling in player count.

Kind Words 2 is the sequel that never should have been. Rather than giving a way for the project's most devoted supporters to give back to the devs, while getting a few neat extras, this game exists as a massive money-sink that would have been significantly better just donated to charity outright. With no real reason to spend so much more than Kind Words, people simply haven't done that - and without a large playerbase the whole game just feels empty.

It calls into question what the purpose of this even was; just to make more money? I'm reminded of The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe, and its commentary on game development and the push for sequels, for NEW, and for the accumulation of wealth. The very ideals of the game seem to fall flat when you realise you're standing in an interaction form of corporate digital waste. Or at least something that feels that way.

Sometimes launching this game, and clicking around the same few points with nothing new about them, makes me feel far worse than if I hadn't launched it at all. I kind of hate Kind Words 2.

Pack 4; like I've mentioned in my first three Jackbox reviews, the price is now ~$25 - in line with the other packs, but higher than it was when I bought it. Is it worth that much in 2025?

Fibbage 3: Stylistically one of the most compelling Jackbox games they've ever made, in both visual and audio design. It really feels like the game's art could be an interesting art piece on its own. The combination of Fibbage 3 and Enough About You also gives this particular title a bunch of variety, and the lie-based trivia is a great format for more personal competition. I don't necessarily think it's the most "fun" game, but it's definitely one of the most interesting, and a personal favourite.

Monster Seeking Monster: Dating people with a twist! Another stylistic home-run for me, the music absolutely slaps, and the presentation is great. Would've loved a similar setting that some of the later packs had for "I'll present // present for me" when the messages are shown on-screen, but ah well.
Unfortunately, MSM is marred a great deal by its balance. Some of the monsters have very niche and weak and monster abilities, and others basically always win by default. As the game focuses a lot on the actual gameplay this time, and not just on funny moments, it's actually a pretty significant issue. Fun until people learn all their powers.

Survive the Internet: In my opinion, one of Jackbox's big lessons in needing to be super clear about how rounds work. Consistently, with any group I've played with, people will be confused about what exactly they're meant to be doing and how the game works unless it's explained to them step-by-step. Aside from that, a pretty strong contender! It's a neat premise, but as with all word-input games it has to be carried by the people playing it, so... Think of it as being good if your group is funny, and mid otherwise. Looks and sounds good though.

Civic Doodle: Similar to Survive the Internet, Civic Doodle needs everyone to play in good faith for it to work properly. Especially on the last round, the framework of rules the game sets up cannot actually be enforced in any way, so it can pretty quickly devolve into just a huge mess - which is rarely very funny. The silly quirky mayor and his assistant do get a little irritating after a bit, but every once in a while it's not so bad. I think this one's probably the weakest in the pack for presentation, but collaborative drawing will always do well as a game concept.

Bracketeering: One of Jackbox's first Big Room games, bracketeering is stylistically on-par with the rest of the pack, but can be hit-or-miss part way through the rounds; the blind rounds are good for a laugh at first, but sometimes stuff just doesn't work that well. Often ends up being a game of "write the funniest thing", prompt be damned. Another one of the titles in this pack that requires everyone to play in good faith, or noone to.

Overall Pack 4 is a really strong contender for its style and the uniqueness of many of its titles; only Fibbage has any games in other packs, so if you want to try MSM, CD, Bracketeering, or StI you have to come here. However, moreso than most other packs, Pack 4 requires everyone to pay attention and really engage with the games being played - nothing is less funny than someone formatting a response wrong for Survive the Internet - and as Jackbox is a collaborative game, if one person messes it up then it's probably messed up for someone (or everyone) else too.