Rhythm games are good when they set out to do the thing and waste no time. I want to immediately jump in and bop to the music and pay attention to everything else later. However, this week’s game is a little more complicated when you introduce a narrative to the mix.

This week is Unbeatable.

Unbeatable is a rhythm adventure game from D-CELL Games and Playstack. It will be released for PlayStation, Xbox, and PC sometime in 2025.

Music is a part of our everyday lives, and Unbeatable poses the idea of what the world would be like if music were illegal. Beat, the pink haired main character, is entangled in a mystery surrounding one of her friends, and is stressed that her friends are mad at her for unknown reasons, and worst of all, the cops are out and about trying to arrest anyone playing music.

Unbeatable is a story of strained friendships and a larger mystery about a family’s disappearance.

Where games devote the entire gameplay to rhythm-based mini-games, Unbeatable takes it a step further and gives the player the ability to investigate large swaths of a coastal town. Upon initial look, I thought that it was unnecessary for a rhythm game to have a deeper story, but as I continued to play the incredibly long demo, that the story beats have their own rhythm mini-games. Things like being a bartender and hitting the batting cages offer the player a break from the mainline rhythm gameplay.

Unbeatable‘s system is simple at a glance, but after being introduced, the difficulty steadily grows. only A and D are used, but I lost track of the number of ways to use these two keys. Before I knew it, I was fighting cops and pressing, mashing, holding for MY LIFE.

Downtime is reflected in the investigation into the disappearance of a bandmate’s mother and father. This investigation is a nice breakaway from the core rhythm gameplay loop. It gives this coastal town a sense of self, and interacting with the inhabitants makes it feel lived in.

Gameplay is pretty standard. Mixing a narrative and rhythm-based game works so well.

I am here for the hand-drawn everything. Unbeatable is a stunning-looking video game. The animated cutscenes and overall game are so full of life and color. Noting short of absolute love was able to craft a game that looks like Unbeatable. The coastal town, the run-down safe house, and even the lighthouse all have their own colors that made me want to just hang out in this beautiful world.

Music from Peak Divide, Rachel Lake, and others really nails the anime rock band vibe. I’m here for the grungy sounds and edgy lyrics. To bring it around, the music connects with the gameplay perfectly, as you hammer in notes, and the screen shakes as the vibrato hits, just makes the music EVEN SWEETER. It is a soundtrack that I have found that I enjoy, to the point of finding it on YouTube.

Unbeatable’s demo just kept going and going. I usually want a demo to take up a max of a ahlf hour, but I was still playing Unbeatable an hour in.

For a rhythm game, Unbeatable hits the nail on the head so far. I am impressed by its visuals and its music. I don’t know how to feel about the story because it is just a demo, but overall, I had a lot of fun finding out who Beat and her bandmates are and how they are going to stick it to the man.