You Can't Beat This Game review: a single painstaking level of getting from point A to point B

If Ballsy Bird and Pretentious Game had a kid, it would be this—You Can’t Beat This Game. I’ve decided to call it ‘Pretentious Rage’, but I guess I should be thankful that at least it’s not as annoying as Flappy Bird.

Gameplay: I just want to get out of this platform, thank you

You Can’t Beat This Game is an simple platformer from Keybol Games. It has no instructions, story, or background music. What it does have are sound effects, a single level, and a death count. In fact, the screenshot below is the entire game.

Good luck getting out of there!

If you’ve played Pretentious Game before, you would realize that the goal is to get to the orange square in the middle of the level. As you can see in the picture, there are only three directional controls. If you fall off the platform, your death will be tallied and you start from the beginning. Sounds easy? But of course, as the saying goes, “it’s easier said than done” and true enough, a couple of deaths later, I still haven’t gotten off of the first platform.

Wondering if it’s because I’m having a bad day or that I’m not a genius at platformers to begin with, I decided to ask someone else to try. Lo and behold, yes, he did get to the next blocks. Not platform, blocks.

Can you really beat this game? And what’s in it for you?

Wondering if the game really can be beaten, I got in touch with developer Bari Silvestre. His answer was yes, and that while he has made it up to the middle platform, he still has not gotten to that orange square. Yes, the creator has not beaten his own game yet.

There is no story in this game, but if you’re the type who gets driven by achieving something few others can, then You Can’t Beat This Game is for you. and if you need more motivation, Keybol Games has a little something on their Google Play app page](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.keybol.cantbeatthis):

If you still managed to beat it, through brute force, cheat, hack or any other way, just email the secret message at the end to melai0707@gmail.com for a prize.

This is the farthest we got to even after sixty deaths later.

I was told that “the person who beats the game will know once they beat it”. If that makes you curious then that’s exactly the point. According to Silvestre, he created the game because he wanted people to be curious and challenged. It was also because he loved playing painstaking and brutal platformers—the same drive behind one of his previous games, Brutal.