unbeatable demo fever

batter batter batter batter batter batter SWING!!

June 2025 ~ also on substack and bear

I adore the UNBEATABLE demo. Since its release, I’ve spent over 30 hours playing it. I’m a very casual video game player, so in absolute terms this is a lot of time for me. It has also given me so much value; I’ve spent more time playing this free demo than many games I have paid money for, which is kind of crazy to me. D-CELL have even turned me into a paying fan before UNBEATABLE’s release by selling me demo songs on Bandcamp.

I’m fascinated by the range of experiences that creative works can evoke, and I have written about being moved by such works before. I thought it would be fun to explore a slightly different phenomenon: how UNBEATABLE captured me and why I think it’s such a good fit.

I learned about UNBEATABLE almost a year ago now, when the 1.0 trailer appeared on my Twitter feed. This is still my all-time favorite game trailer (although to be fair, I don’t watch many game trailers). Everyone should watch it, it’s so good! The direction was tight; it felt like every shot had a purpose and the visuals were nicely intertwined with the music. I especially love the trailer’s ending. Also, even though it’s not primarily a gameplay trailer, it was shot entirely in-engine, which I find extremely cool.

Anyway, this trailer was totally to my taste and convinced me to wishlist the game. At this point, I still wouldn’t say that I knew much about the game. The trailer piqued my interest with the hints of rhythm and narrative elements, but the most important factor was simply how much I liked the trailer in isolation. I knew I wanted to hear updates about the game and just assumed there wasn’t more I could do right now.

A year later, the demo released and I pretty much went into it blind. When I think “demo”, I think about the few Next Fest games I tried that had approximately an hour of gameplay. The UNBEATABLE demo is not that. Just playing through the available story slice and giving arcade mode a decent shot probably takes like five hours.

Obviously, I had a good time playing through the demo. I finished the story over the course of two evenings and have been playing arcade mode since. I kind of can’t believe how much I enjoy this demo and how excited I am for the game to release. I don’t play games much, so I haven’t had a game resonate this way for a long time. How did this happen?

I’ll start with my arcade mode experience.

This component of UNBEATABLE is a two-button rhythm game; you press up and/or down in time with the music and with the items scrolling toward the two vertical bars in the center. As I understand it, in-universe this is generally you, the player, playing a song on stage.

A two-button rhythm game happens to be a good fit for me. First, I’m a casual player, and a two-button rhythm game is, in the grand scheme of things, pretty easy to ramp up on. The easiest levels are just “press one of two buttons every few seconds”, and there is a pretty robust set of beatmaps to smoothly develop skill. Second, I played osu! for some time in high school, so I was already familiar with rhythmically tapping keys.

I don’t think there’s a great way to write about the raw gameplay loop of tapping keys and being scored on your accuracy; either you find it fun or you don’t. I tried it and had fun, and I suggest people try it for themselves while the demo is freely available.

The other component of UNBEATABLE is a 3D fixed-camera adventure game. You run around exploring and talking to people and playing through a story.

I found the demo’s adventure slice pretty compelling as well. I felt like my discovery efforts were rewarded and I had fun with the dialogue. The soundtrack also generally fits the town’s idyllic aesthetic, so just existing and running around felt nice.

It’s easy to describe UNBEATABLE in terms of its adventure pieces and its rhythm pieces, but these aren’t really separate. One source of delight was playing through the narrative and discovering the rhythm game elements sprinkled into the world’s activities. This ranges from the beloved Whacktown to trivially tapping along while admiring an in-game visual. I’m really excited to see what other mini-games the developers come up with.

The most exciting property of this game, however, is how I expect the narrative to enhance my connection to the soundtrack. In isolation, I already really like a lot of the songs. But I know myself well enough to say that how much I like a song is not the only factor in how much I’ll play it. My playlist includes many songs that I listen to because I feel some connection them; openings for beloved anime are probably the plurality. With UNBEATABLE, I anticipate something similar. I predict that I’ll be drawn in by the narrative and that my feelings toward the story will bleed into my feelings toward the soundtrack.

Thinking back to my time playing osu!, I never played it solely for the love of the game. While I found the gameplay engaging, it was just as important for me to be playing songs that I liked. After a while, there wasn’t enough overlap between the set of maps that I wanted to play and the set of songs that I wanted to play; I ultimately churned from the game around the end of high school and haven’t seriously played since. UNBEATABLE looks like it will be stickier for me; I’m hopeful that this combination of gameplay, music, and narrative will be even greater than the sum of its parts.

appendix: offhand feedback

During my play-through of the demo, I also took notes on rough edges that I encountered.

First, some small story slice notes: STORY SPOILERS BEGIN

• I found the dandelion behind the shack super early on, but I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. On a second play-through, I still couldn’t figure it out, although I also didn’t try very hard.
• I walked past the “clean the floor” pile in the shack for like 20 seconds. I didn’t visually distinguish it from the rest of the floor, and I guess I got unlucky and ran in circles around that pile without getting close enough to show the prompt.
• Minor thing, but those activities with the two horizontal lines are supposed to be song writing? It definitely makes sense in hindsight, but I did not put that together at all. I kind of thought I was just enjoying the scenery with a chill activity to go along with it.

I also have, at best, very mixed feelings on what I understand to be a scripted loss to the cops. I didn’t know it was a scripted loss for a while, so I just felt like shit for being the reason that Quaver’s picture gets burnt. Maybe that’s the point, to make the player feel an emotional gut punch. But it felt much more like an artifact of an imperfect simulation, one that breaks the norms of video games and makes reasonable paths impossible to explore. Infinite rebirth and all, right?

I think I wouldn’t feel so cheated if it was obvious that I stumbled into an overwhelmingly unfavorable situation. I didn’t get that impression though. That cop battle is also juxtaposed with the ones at the lighthouse and the town square, which are very obviously at my set difficulty level. Narratively, they feel pretty similar to me, so the difficulty feels out of place.

I don’t have a great solution here. Maybe having obviously terrible odds dampens the emotional impact of the outcome. Maybe it feels too off to have a swarm of cops just appear underneath this building. In any case, current script left a bitter taste in my mouth.

STORY SPOILERS END

For arcade mode:

• All I really want is a score tracking system. Just knowing my current high score feels too coarse. What was my per-note accuracy? What was my longest combo? I’m also curious about my play history. How many times did I get close to beating my current high score? When did those happen? I feel like it would give me a better sense of my improvement over time.
• Please bring back true (from noisz sl) level 13 T_T I am dying to play an in-between difficulty of that song. I’m still not sure if it got like silently pulled for reworking, or if it’s just me and one other person that have encountered some kind of cursed bug. But being in limbo is worse.
• Speaking of the NOISZ songs, the red circles confused me a bit when I was starting. I understand now that it’s a reference, and I actually think that’s quite cool. At the time though, I incorrectly thought, “Oh, it’s a circle and I hit circles, maybe this is just a special kind that can come in from the middle and I have to react to whether it goes up or down”. Maybe that’s just a skill issue though.
• Since it’s a demo, I don’t hold it against D-CELL for there being visual inconsistencies in some beatmaps. They are consistently present in a small subset of maps though. These range from benign, like missing a vertical bar connecting a set of top-bottom notes, to genuinely annoying things, like notes in EMPTY DIARY unbeatable difficulty occasionally going invisible as if I turned on osu! hidden mode. It’s always the same ones, so it doesn’t bother me now, but it definitely bothered me when I was still primarily sight-reading the map.
• Something feels very slightly off about the double sliders near the end of WAITING level 13. It feels like the sliders come slightly earlier than they should, so I have to tap before I feel like the song is telling me to.
• I’m not sure what the tall pink thing I’m supposed to rapidly tap is called, but I feel like it’s missing some visual feedback. I was treating it like an osu! spinner and just tapping as fast as I could. However, there are some maps where this is not the optimal strategy; one can perfect this obstacle tapping very little, and tapping in time with the music sets you up better for notes that immediately follow (FAMILIAR level 12 and WAITING level 13 come to mind). I still don’t really know how these work. I think they go away after a set amount of time, not hits? I don’t think getting more hits in affects my score? I’m not sure what the accuracy criteria is.