There’s a lurch in Unbeatable, the debut work from developer D-Cell Games, finally out after a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2021. Pink-haired and surly protagonist Beat and her soon-to-be bandmates are locked up in a prison, with no choice but to get through the doldrums of inmate life before the inevitable escape. You have to run back and forth across a drab environment, repeat a boring “minigame,” win small combat encounters that don’t do the rhythm gameplay justice, and then get through a sewer maze like you’re playing the worst part of Xenogears reborn. I was worried this would color the whole experience, alongside some general jankiness and fumbly writing. But a few hours later the story was over, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.
So much Dreamcast energy
Unbeatable is almost like someone whose most formative media experiences were Jet Grind Radio, Scott Pilgrim, and Fooly Cooly made it their life’s work to create the most banger-ass Dreamcast game of all time. A simple-but-unforgiving rhythm combat system is held up by two columns:
- A story that turns the heart-wrenching awe of experiencing a live band perform for the first time into a springboard for a post-apocalyptic examination of why some humans are willing to destroy themselves for the sake of making art
- A fully-featured arcade music game that could’ve been a whole separate entity.
Both sides are powered by a screaming onslaught of color, defiance, vulnerability, and a soundtrack with so much juice I’m internally begging for a physical edition.
The story is set in a world that has outlawed music. Something about crowds of people sharing an aural experience started summoning monsters called The Silence, and an authoritarian police force called HARM was desperately established to stamp down something nearly as important to people as eating and breathing.
Beat, a mysterious sicko haphazardly carrying a guitar, meets Quaver, a youngster with ties to, ostensibly, the world’s last band performance. Quaver is 12 and stupid (complimentary), and secretly makes music to connect to her long-gone parents. After a quiet performance in an abandoned arena summons The Silence (and many, many cops), the pair end up on the run after causing tons of property damage on a highway. Apparently, this is the best time to try and form a band.
Big heart, small problems
Going through the six-ish hours of story mode was like a rollercoaster. For everything that was weird and/or annoying (and there was a lot), there was something that captured my brain and heart like a rocket-powered grappling hook latched on and took off again.
Each chapter’s marquee music setpiece, combining the basic note charts with interstitials of “combat,” melodramatic dialogue, and bespoke mechanics and note gimmicks (including rail-grinding segments straight out of Sonic Adventure, go figure), was inspiring. The passion from the team’s marriage of storytelling and music radiates from the screen in these moments, even when rough, janky screen transitions and some unintuitive and hard-to-read prompts get in the way.
“Getting in its own way” is a common theme for when Unbeatable stumbles. It wants its story mode to have a greater sense of scope beyond just stringing music gameplay together with cutscenes. You explore spaces, run into minigames, talk to people—regular video game stuff. The connective tissue is where issues pop up, especially when it comes to the game visibly struggling to keep itself together when moving between scenes.
Some of that seemed to improve with patches as time went on, but without playing through the story multiple times in a row it’s hard to keep tabs. During my run I’d also run into weird glitches and bugs, some of which prevented the story from progressing and required a reboot to keep going.
The story can be a bit hard to follow at times, too, with the big moments handled with care and clarity but the in-between once again struggling with typographical errors, confusing continuity, and jarring shifts in time and space. It’s fair to say that while the themes and vibes are immaculate, the “plot” is delivered awkwardly at times.
Minigames, which offer a sprinkling of Rhythm Heaven-inspired play, are cute, but suffer from those aforementioned confusing prompts. There are times when you’ll have a second at best to recognize a gameplay demand is happening, decipher what is happening, and maybe not mess it up.
Luckily you get a lot of tries and I never felt in danger of failing one of these and derailing the story’s momentum, but the “lots of tries” part meant these moments go on way too long and overstay their welcome (a batting cage and “stealth” section asking me to repeat a beat over and over for what felt like minutes come to mind), or they go by so fast and are so inconsequential it felt like getting randomly slapped in the face for no reason during cool moments.
There was one time my progress was halted by a particularly unintuitive and annoying bartending minigame, which at one point I failed then passed despite not changing what I did. Weird stuff.
Arcade mode? More like a whole other bonus game
All this led to a weird rhythm (no pun intended but I’m defiantly refusing to hit backspace to change it, that’s art baby) in which I’d feel kind of annoyed and confused when navigating Unbeatable’s world, then I’d get rocked and almost moved to tears when things kicked into gear properly.
The power of a game nailing Its Thing That It Does with such aplomb is how little the former feels like it matters in lieu of the latter.
And that’s all without going into the arcade mode, which totally does away with the stuff that was bothersome about story mode, let me immediately reminisce about what I loved when replaying the songs, and brought its own distinct kind of joy with a healthy bounty of b-sides and remixes. There are even fun unlockables and stuff to tinker with there that have nothing to do with the story.
It’s so much further than the label “arcade mode” suggests, which was a great surprise after coming down from the heightened emotional whiplash of story mode. I’ll definitely keep coming back to arcade mode in my spare time.
Final thoughts
Ultimately, what do I score a game like Unbeatable that has such observable problems but some of the most heart-pumping emotional resonance I’ve experienced in games throughout this entire year? What cute, little video game review cliche can I lean on to help me out of this predicament?
D-Cell itself offered a cheeky, little take at how review scores can be perceived, and I figure why not send that ball back over the net? I was thinking a seven at first, but Sonic Adventure 2’s problems are way more frustrating than Unbeatable’s. And I am a little shy as a person. So let’s go with that.
Unbeatable is available on December 9, 2025 for the PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. A PC code was provided by the publisher for review.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/147083/unbeatable-review-score