VGC’s BitSummit game of the show is Unrestricted, the Superman game we always wanted

The BitSummit convention in Kyoto took place this weekend, and there was a host of impressive indie games on display.

If you aren’t familiar with it, BitSummit is the leading indie festival in Japan, and developers from all over the world come to show off their new and upcoming titles.

It was an indie game from Japan, however, that caught our eye most, and is the title we’re most curious to see more from going forwards. Which is probably just as well, because it sounds like it’s a long way off yet.

Unrestricted is a game from Osaka-based studio Indie-us Games, which describes itself as “a group of professionals specialising in Unreal Engine”.

In the past the studio has provided support work for bigger budget games, including working with Bandai Namco on Scarlet Nexus and with Sega on an arcade game based on the Initial D street racing manga series.

Back in August 2019 it released Undefeated, a free game on Steam in which players control “an invincible hero with unlimited super powers”.

While brief – it can be beaten in less than an hour – it got generally positive reviews, with most of the negativity coming from players having issues getting it to work in the first place.

Now the same team is working on a successor, Unrestricted, and this time it plans to make it a fully-fledged game rather than a short, free experience.

Unrestricted tells the story of a college student who’s caught in a meteorite strike and wakes up on a new planet, discovering that he now has super powers.

This planet is now being inhabited by violent mutant creatures, so it’s up to the protagonist to use his new skills to give them a firm kicking.

Running on Unreal Engine 5, Unrestricted looks very impressive for a game that’s still at an early prototype stage. Before we played the game we were handed a small card with a QR link to its Steam page and a “Release 2025” message. This one’s a long way off.

Still, despite this, we really enjoyed the 10-minute demo we played. It takes place on a large open field where monsters are roaming around, and the player is free to walk or fly wherever they like, toggling between the two with the press of a button. There’s also a boost button, for when you have to fly great distances in a short time.

While it’s possible to attack enemies with standard melee moves, that isn’t really what Unrestricted appears to be about. From the start of the demo the player is already armed with a bunch of extremely powerful moves, from a laser to a huge fireball that looks very much like a Dragon Ball ‘kamehameha’.

Indeed, as we spoke to one of the developers while waiting to play the demo, he explained that Dragon Ball was a “big inspiration” for the team. It’s understandable – were Namco Bandai to ever make an odd Dragon Ball spin-off that used realistic graphics instead of show-accurate cel-shaded appearance, it may look something like this.

Although it wasn’t shown much in the demo, the player’s special attacks can have an actual impact on the landscape too. A trailer shown alongside the demo showed the player using the laser vision to engrave a smiley face on the side of a giant mountain, while it should be possible to burrow holes and tunnels into the environment.

In some ways it could be argued that at this early stage there isn’t a lot about Unrestricted that hasn’t been done before. Combat with special powers is nothing new, and even landscape destruction rears its head from time to time.

What has us excited about the game, however, is how well everything already feels at this extremely early stage. A lot of games have an ambitious concept but simply aren’t fun to play when all’s said and done.

With Unrestricted, though, we already had fun flying around and annihilating enemies, popping them into the air and juggling them with comically overpowered combos then flying over to another group of ground-based enemies and dropping a big lightning strike on them.

What still remains to be seen is how the concept will expand beyond this initial field area – the trailer shows an abandoned city area too, for example – and when the actual release date will be. Something as vague as 2025 for a game as ambitious as this has the potential to be pushed back even further.

“2025?” we asked, pointing to the card we were given.

“Yes,” the developer replied, then paused, smiling. “Maybe.”