Indie Rhythm Game Unbeatable Suffers Last-Minute Delay

D-Cell, Playstack, UNBEATABLE

If you’ve been following the development of Unbeatable since its announcement as a Kickstarter project in 2021, you’ll know it’s been hotly anticipated by its audience for years now. The game has only grown more promising in the long road to its release. The launch of its demo and “White Label” prologue had certainly aided in this.

During Gamescom Opening Night Live it was announced that not only will Unbeatable be published by Balatro publisher Playstack, but the game was finally planned to release on November 6. Unfortunately, a last-minute progression blocking bug was found by the game’s QA testers just one day before launch,. This prompted developer D-Cell to make the tough call to delay the game until December 9.

In a Steam news post RJ Lake, the game’s director, wrote “QA hit a low-repro progression blocker last night that’s serious enough it’s considered unreleasable. Fixing this would require pushing the console release date back because of cert timelines, and not fixing this is, well. We refuse to do that. We’re fixing it.”

With regard to the new release date, Lake wrote “We had a pretty good spot on November 6 where we made a small little island for ourselves, and skipping that date necessarily means skipping forward a lot to find another island, and that’s the closest one we had.”

The Logic in Delays

While delaying the entire game over a hard-to-reproduce, game-breaking bug is undoubtedly a tough decision on behalf of D-Cell and Playstack, it’s easy to see why it is the correct one. Many gamers lament the unpolished state that many AAA games launch in despite their success. Indie games, unfortunately, do not have this luxury. It’s often said that it is incredibly difficult to choose when to release an indie game. Specifically, titles can cannibalize one another due to the rapid pace of the industry. We just saw this with the many titles that were delayed due to the sudden release of Hollow Knight: Silksong. Hopefully, this decision pays off for the team and Unbeatable isn’t actually “unbeatable” (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Unbeatable will release on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S on December 9.

Will you be playing Unbeatable? Let us know in the comments below.