Unbeatable

Unbeatable is a rhythm adventure game divided into an arcade mode and a story mode. The arcade mode has the player select a song out of a list and press buttons in time with the song. The player uses two buttons to target the top and bottom tracks as icons move towards the center of the screen, which represents attacking Silence monsters or police officers. Targets can come from the left or right of the screen for Silence and top or bottom for police.

The background is a side view of the selected character, and the view changes position as targets come from different sides. Some enemy targets must be attacked multiple times, be dodged, or require the attack to be held down for a time period. Each target is scored based on how close to the center line it is when the player attacks; too many misses will fail the song. A grade is given at the end of the song for the player's overall performance.

The game opens with Eve, the lead singer of the band One More Final, in an arena venue performing their last concert, before shifting to Beat, a pink-haired woman waking up under a tree. She sees a young girl, Quaver, who tells Beat to hide her guitar and guides her to the nearby city. Beat discovers that it is a police state controlled by HARM (Harmony And Resonance Management), an organization that forbids all music; playing it summons mysterious monsters called the Silence that attack indiscriminately. Quaver reveals that the now-deceased Eve was her mother, and the pair play a song in the abandoned arena from the introduction, fighting off the Silence as they do, and then fleeing from HARM.

After learning that HARM has arrested Clef and Treble—former pop stars and repeat music offenders—for the incident, Quaver and Beat decide to rescue them, and are promptly captured themselves. The four escape from prison with the help of a smuggler, Penny, and flee to a nearby seaside town. At Quaver's suggestion, the four of them form the band "UNBEATABLE", despite initial resistance from Clef and Treble, and spend the next few months playing underground shows.

Unbeatable was developed by D-Cell Games, with Andrew Tsai as the lead artist and co-director, RJ Lake as the lead writer and co-director, and Jeffrey Chiao as the lead producer and rhythm game beat map designer. The final core development team was seven people, with around thirty total developers including contracted programmers and artists. Development on the game began in November 2017 with a concept by Tsai, and an early version was shown at the January 2019 MAGFest Indie Video Game Showcase, with a side-scrolling 2D art style and four-button rhythm gameplay. Later that year, the team restarted development with a different art style, game engine, and condensed storyline, and continued "pre-production" development until mid-2020, when they decided that the concept was solidified enough to enter full production.

In April 2021, D-Cell released a demo side-story to the game titled Unbeatable [white label], featuring 12 songs with two-button rhythm gameplay, and launched a Kickstarter campaign for the game for US$55,000, with a planned release in 2023. The campaign was funded in 15 hours, with a total amount of over $267,000. An album of music from the demo, "Unbeatable: Demo Tapes", was released in May 2021.

Unbeatable received "mixed or average" reviews, according to the review aggregator Metacritic. V. Club, and Leigh Price of Rock Paper Shotgun all enjoyed how it was easy to understand but scaled up to be very difficult. IGN's Gabriel Moss, however, called it "functional but shallow", and also criticized how little rhythm gameplay was present in the first chapters of the Story mode, as did Rock Paper Shotgun.

The Arcade mode was especially praised by Siliconera, Rock Paper Shotgun, and Lucas White of Shacknews for the variety and challenge of songs. V. Club enjoyed them, Siliconera felt some were not very fun. Multiple reviewers criticized a variety of bugs in the release version of the game, including conversations being cut off, voice lines not being spoken, and abrupt transitions between scenes.