A game where music is illegal and you do crimes. It’s the perfect tone-setting tagline for Unbeatable, a rhythm game about a bunch of young adults (and one child) rebelling against an oppressive regime by playing raucous garage rock.
There are two sides to Unbeatable (which the game insists should be written in all caps or no caps, but in the spirit of rebellion I will be defying this request). The A-side is the story of the aforementioned rebels as they form a four-piece band (also called Unbeatable) and take on anti-music cops, blending visual novel storytelling and assorted action sequences. The B-side is Arcade mode, where the only goal is to get better at playing through a collection of original songs.
Both modes are built around a basic rhythm mechanic. Your character stands in between two tracks, one above and one below, and notes fly in for you to hit in time with the beat. This is mixed up with notes that must be dodged instead of hit, notes that fly onto the other track when hit and must be hit a second time, notes that must be held, or notes that require you to mash the buttons like you’re hammering out a drum solo (the best kind). Since there are only two buttons to concern yourself with, it’s incredibly easy to pick up, but as the difficulty increases and the song charts get more complex, it can get hectic.
Because of the simplicity of all this, there are multiple options available to adjust which buttons correspond to up and down. If you’re using a controller, like I was, I strongly recommend switching to the shoulders/triggers for up and D-pad/face buttons for down. The default was left and right shoulders for down and up, which broke my brain when notes started switching between left and right sides of the screen. Controller and keyboard inputs can be changed independently of each other too.
Story mode plays with this in a number of interesting ways. Sometimes it’s a fight sequence, where the appearance of the notes changes, and each successful hit on the beat leads you to punching an opponent. Other sequences merely ask you to press a button on the beat like a QTE, with the most notable being a batting cage minigame that slowly drove me insane with its weird variable timings.
Story mode is where the heart of Unbeatable can be found. You play as Beat, a down-and-out slacker who wakes up in a field, and is roped into helping out a twelve-year-old girl named Quaver who wants to investigate what happened to her musician mother. This leads to a run-in with H.A.R.M., short for Harmonics and Resonance Management, an organisation whose job is to take down illegal musicians. The two then team up with the twins Treble and Clef, starting a band with the goal of taking the fight to H.A.R.M. through the Almighty Power of Rock. Incredibly cheesy, of course, but it’s the kind of cheese I’ll happily devour every single time.
That said, Unbeatable’s story doesn’t always put its best drum-pedalling foot forward. After a linear introductory episode, we’re immediately sent to prison for a series of repetitive, menial tasks. It’s strange sequence to frontload the game with, as it kills the pacing right out of the gate. Thankfully it doesn’t last, as the episode ends in a prison break sequence that reveals just how much the team at D-Cell (correctly) love Jet Set Radio before things properly kick into gear in the remaining episodes.
If you’ve enjoyed any kind of Scott Pilgrim media, you’ll know what the vibe is here. Musicians are powerful fighters and the villains are anime caricatures (complimentary). In these middle chapters, there’s a greater sense of freedom, allowing you to rock out with new songs, play The Floor is Lava in a traffic jam, defiantly throw up posters over H.A.R.M. propaganda and, yes, hit the batting cages. But you can also explore and find moments of quiet reflection, emphasising the joy of simply taking inspiration from the world around you and turning it into music.
This is all complemented by a unique DIY aesthetic, one which draws heavily from anime and zine culture in equal measure. The flat sprites on 3D backdrops give a paper-cutout look, while the animated sequences feel like they fell out of a cult anime from the 90s, right down to a shift into a 4:3 aspect ratio. It does go a bit wonky sometimes, as scene transitions and fight sequences often cause sprites to land in weird places. It’s not clear if this is something that will be fixed in the final release, but while it is a little jarring, it does little to harm the experience and even manages to work with the game’s scrappy, handmade charm.
While I expected Unbeatable’s brash punk tone, I didn’t expect how much the story also veers off into dreamlike surrealism. H.A.R.M. exist because something mysterious and terrible happened prior to the game’s events and Beat herself is also surrounded in mystery. No one seems to know anything about where she came from, and she keeps drifting off into strange dreams set in a void bathed in sunset.
Sadly, these two elements never truly felt like they paid off for me. The incident that sparked everything is never truly elaborated on, while the penultimate chapter provides revelations about Beat that end up contradicting what we learn in the final one. There are clearly some cool concepts at work here, but at best it feels like something important was left on the cutting room floor, and at worst it can feel like the worldbuilding was made up as the team went along.
However, there is a line in the final chapter – “music is feeling” – that sums up where the writing excels. It fumbles on the external worldbuilding but on the internal elements (characters, feelings, relationships), it sings at the top of its lungs. The core band are a bunch of weirdos who are constantly bantering with each other, and much of the game’s humour comes from Clef being an aggressive loudmouth, Beat being constantly sarcastic, Treble being awkward, and Quaver being “like five” (she is twelve). This is a group I want to hang out with more, as messy and contradictory they all are.
Messy and contradictory is the key takeaway here. At its core, Unbeatable is a story of a young woman trying to find her place in a world that rejects her. Beat is a mess of insecurities, which the game never shies away from exploring. This is especially true in the game’s final chapter, a deeply emotive and admirably earnest delve into the value of relationships and the power of human creativity. It all builds up to a triumphant final song that hammers the message home and brushes away all of the story’s weaker elements. This climax hits hard in ways I did not expect from the silly punk rock rhythm game. I challenge you not to shed a tear. I certainly failed.
However, after taking about ten hours to get through the story, the real meat of Unbeatable can be found in Arcade mode, which presents a huge list of songs, split into four categories: songs by Unbeatable (the band), additional non-diegetic music from Story mode, remixes of the previous two categories, and a secret fourth category that is best discovered for yourself. Anyone who’s played a Guitar Hero or similar rhythm game can guess how this is structured: select your song and your difficulty and then play through them with the goal of racking up the best scores possible.
It’s not just score-chasing though, as Arcade mode is built heavily around the Challenge Board, a wide selection of cryptic achievements that unlock online titles, new characters, and new songs. Some of these are obvious or will just naturally unlock as you play the story, while others are completely baffling. But that’s the draw here. These challenges are designed to keep you coming back, figuring out the clues and experimenting until something clicks. And since I keep loading the game up because I think I’ve figured out a clue later and want to try out my theory, it’s clearly working.
It also helps that the song selection is consistently excellent. It’s surprisingly varied, including grungy garage rock, ambient electronica, high intensity jungle, and Hideki Naganuma-inspired breakbeat, all of it catchy and addictive. The only critique I have of the tune selection is that the soundtrack officially releases at the end of December rather than right now. This is another reason I keep loading the game back up, because I have to hear more of these songs.
I also would have liked to see Arcade mode offer selectable, or at least a wider assortment of, backdrops. While the story features a range of settings, with action taking place in concert halls, warehouse hideouts, dreamscapes and more, every stage of Arcade mode sticks you in the same rural Japanese train station. This is especially jarring for the song Waiting, which in the story features a train chase and Quaver wailing out a guitar solo behind the action, while in Arcade mode it’s… just the train station. For a game so confident in its art direction and themes of self-expression, the lack of different background options feels like an oversight. It’s a relatively small thing, but it did bother me enough to wonder why it wasn’t there.
Much like the titular band, Unbeatable is a game that doesn’t always hit the right notes but exudes so much heart and enthusiasm that it’s hard not to fall in love. It’s a sincere celebration of the creative spirit that overcomes its own rough edges by getting everything right where it counts. This is a song you’ll want to stick on repeat.