In a true nightmare scenario, this anticipated indie has been delayed only hours before launch for a 'boring and frustrating' reason

Unbeatable is a rhythm adventure with a lavish hand-drawn anime style and "arcade-flawless" gameplay. It's set in a world where music is illegal, which means not only are you breaking the law by playing it, but occasionally the situation warrants punching cops. Count me in! Alas, it's just been delayed by a month, mere hours before its scheduled November 6 release date.

According to RJ Lake at studio D-Cell Games, the delay is unavoidable. "There’s a very boring and frustrating reason," Lake wrote on Steam. "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."

In other words, a rare progress-blocking bug was discovered at the eleventh hour and, because pushing updates to console platforms is much more time-consuming than it is on Steam, the studio and its publisher Playstack have decided to push the whole affair back by a month. Unbeatable will now release on December 9.

That is over a month from the game's expected launch, which is probably frustrating for anyone looking forward to it. But as we've learned several times this year, delaying games is science all of its own: blindly pushing the release by a week would have it staring down Black Ops 7, to name one example.

"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," Lake wrote. "On the plus side, it gives us breathing room we didn’t have before to do some pre-launch things we wanted to do that had to get pushed back because of finishing the game in time for, well, tomorrow."

Natalie Clayton played the Unbeatable demo all the way back in 2021, and judging by what she wrote, I can see why people have been looking forward to it. "Unbeatable is, hands down, the rawest, coolest thing I've seen all year," Clayton wrote, which is great. You don't see people writing things like that about Black Ops 7.