During this year’s Gamescom, I had the chance to chat with the developers of D-CELL Games about their upcoming game, UNBEATABLE! Today, I’m super excited to not only share the little chat about the game we had but to also announce that the game is finally releasing on November 6th, 2025!
It’s been a good while since I first reviewed the demo, UNBEATABLE [white label] (Review here), and I’ve been incredibly excited about this upcoming rhythm adventure game ever since then.
The exclusive side-story UNBEATABLE [white label] released as a free prologue of sorts on Steam in 2021 and is currently sitting on over six thousand overwhelmingly positive reviews! The new demo, however, is in a much more polished state and gives a lot of insights into what awaits players in the upcoming release.
So, if you haven’t yet, make sure to wishlist the full release!
- Can you introduce yourself and say a bit about what you do? :)
Andrew: I’m Andrew Tsai, I am one of the directors at UNBEATABLE alongside RJ Lake. I’m responsible for a huge number of different things in this game including art and animation direction, programming, game design, narrative… well, some of the narrative, not quite the writing, but a lot of the structure!
- To the point of it being easier to list what you don’t do than what you do…?
Andrew: Yes, kind of! Kind of!
Jeffrey: Similar in that sense, I’m Jeffrey Chiao. I’m one of the game’s producers, I’m also the game’s arcade mode designer, among a lot of other things, like management, production, design, etc.
Andrew: Not here right now but here at the event we also have RJ Lake, the other director. He’s in charge of music direction, narrative design. He’s the one that actually writes the dialogue for most of the characters. We also have Rachel Lake who is one of our vocalists and also one of the producers on the game.
We are a pretty sizable team. You know, it takes an army to make a game. We got about thirty employees, so, you know it’s not just us.
Well, if we were to discuss company structure, we have a sort of creative leadership of about seven people, and then everyone outside of that, there are contractors, animators, modellers, programmers on the game. In total we are roughly thirty people.
- What is UNBEATABLE about?
Andrew: It is a narrative adventure rhythm game. We have two modes in UNBEATABLE – the Arcade mode and a very rich 60-hour Narrative Adventure mode that you can play through.
What we really wanted to do was give context to the songs you are playing. We really wanted to make a reason for the music and the action to coalesce into a single thing. So that’s what we’re doing in the narrative mode.
We made a world where music is illegal and you do crimes.
Jeffrey: And the Arcade mode half takes a lot of the songs and you can just play them on multiple difficulties in various settings with multiple progression systems. The intent here is to basically indoctrinate people into getting why the genre is so cool. The levels have a low skill floor but a high skill ceiling in terms of the designs.
It lets you play everything from the story mode, as well as a few extras, including collaborations with other games and a bunch of originals that don’t necessarily fit the context of UNBEATABLE’s story but still are produced in-house through the same processes as the story mode half.
- So, a big focus is making the game as accessible as possible while making sure that veterans of the genre can still find joy in the higher skill ceiling of the title?
Andrew: Yes! Our game has an original and rich narrative and very deep rhythm game mechanics, and even if you only enjoy one of these parts, we hope that players still find something they really enjoy in our game.
- What is something that sets UNBEATABLE apart from other rhythm games?
Andrew: So, the thing I really like to set apart is twofold. It’s really in the fact that we are putting so much effort into doing as much as we can in-house. All of our animation as well as much of the music as we can we are doing in-house with our own composers and musicians.
It really helps with creating a very cohesive package that we hope will really speak to people, especially fans of this sort of era we’re drawing our influence from.
The other thing I really like to point out is our narrative mode. There are other rhythm games that have stories, too, but we’d like to think that we have put the most focus into ours compared to other titles that have stories to go with their songs.
- So, you have a band of three girls and a guy in the game, right? What are their personal motivations for putting themselves out there and creating music in a world where doing so is illegal?
Andrew: Yes, there are Beats, Cleff, Quaver and Treble. Regarding their reasons, it’s a very complex question since our characters have a very deep set of motivations and trauma that they’re sort of working through.
This really is in a lot of ways a coming-of-age story and a narrative where they are sort of coming to terms with adulthood and adolescense, and what it really means to be a creative soul in a world that doesn’t value creativity.
A lot of those themes are driving the anti-authoritarian messaging that we’re sort of pushing in this game. Obviously, in our tutorial, you do punch several cops in the face, and that is sort of the vibe we’re gunning for in this game.
I can’t really get too deep into the characters’ motivation, obviously, since there are a lot of spoilers that I need to avoid. Just let it be known that each of our characters has their own strong, very compelling reasons that are sort of influencing their decision to act against the government of this world.
[RJ and Rachel join us at the booth.]
Oh, actually, while we’re talking about narrative, here’s RJ.
RJ: My name’s RJ Lake. I’m one of the directors on the project. Alongside Andrew, I handle narrative design and music direction.
Rachel: Hi, I’m Rachel Lake. I’m one of the producers and a vocalist on UNBEATABLE.
- What’s your favourite part of working on a game like UNBEATABLE?
Andrew: Honestly, the people. Our team is absolutely incredible. Every single person that works on this is game brings something really special.
One of the things, and I’ll just speak for myself as the person in charge of art direction and animation direction, is that I really wanted to showcase the artists’ individual sensibilities and what ignites their creativity. They’re all bringing something unique to the table, and I’m against doing this sort of in-depth character and animation correction.
So, when you watch the animation in our game, you can identify exactly who drew what. You know, what scenes, what frames, what characters were done by each person on the team. They each bring their own style to the team and I never wanted to hamper, draw over or sanitize any of that.
I absolutely love everyone working on the game. They all do so, so much. As I said before, it takes an army of people to make a game like this and I want to make sure that every person on the team gets the credit that they deserve.
Rachel: And it’s nice that everything’s in house. Animation, music, everything. So we get to bounce off each other and it really cultivates this very cohesive thing, even though everyone has their individual style, you can still see the whole picture.
Andrew: Strong creative focus and also very talented – very, very, very talented – people.
- The game has been in development for a very long time, right? How do you stay motivated throughout this development phase?
Andrew: You know, it can be a struggle at times.
RJ: Yeah, we had some dark nights of the soul on this project.
Rachel: Truthfully, you know it’s not always sunshine and rainbows. You have your moments where it’s tough. We had people arguing,- in fact, I would say that if you don’t have people arguing on a regular basis, you need to get those gears turning somehow.
Jeffrey: Yeah, (if they don’t argue) they probably aren’t as invested in the project.
Rachel: Right! Exactly, it’s not always going to be easy.
Andrew: You don’t always want to be surrounded by people who just nod along and say “yes, yes, yes, yes, yes”.
Rachel: To stay motivated, what’s important is making sure that you work with good people – is my point.
RJ: People you respect, and people you like.
Rachel: People that care about what they’re working on as if it was their baby. Like, yeah, it’s our baby.
Jeffrey: We really believe in it, too. Even when it has gotten really tough, we still believed in it and really felt that we’re making something that only we can make. Only this combination of people and the circumstances that brought us together could make this game happen. I’d put everything into it to make sure that we all got there in the end together.
Andrew: Just speaking as the creative leads on the project, RJ and I have both fought over every aspect of the game.
RJ: Oh yeah!
Andrew: But also we’d been in calls at five in the morning. (RJ’s laughing) Just trying to motivate each other. We are best friends and we’re basically family at this point. That just means that when we argue, it’s from a place of respect.
RJ: It just means that we want to push the thing forward. We argue about the project because we care about how we solve things to reach the goal. We have the same goal in mind but we have different visions of how we get to that goal, and every time, it leads to an argument about how to better get to a solution for each issue.
- Anything else you’d like to say?
Andrew: UNBEATABLE releases November 6th! We’re still hard at work. Check out our new trailer that we just released during ONL (Opening Night Live), just a couple days ago. We’re gearing up for launch. It’s super busy at the studio. We flew out to Germany just to really gaige public reaction to the thing, but right when we get home, we’ll have to get all six gears into motion to “GO!” again.
It has been an absolutely lovely time chatting with Andrew and the others, and I just found it lovely to suddenly be surrounded by four people when I initially was only there talking to one person. They really gave the vibe of a well-oiled machine and a family of sorts.
The devs are incredibly passionate about their craft, and UNBEATABLE both sounds and looks absolutely phenomenal. I’ve had a blast playing the new demo lately, and I’d highly encourage you to check out the Steam page and give it a try yourself!
Again, the game’s releasing soon, on November 6th, and I’m just so darn hyped for it.
This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.
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