![]() To explain how it did this, I have to talk more about the game's structure and detail. Between all the people talking about “true endings” on Twitter and the game’s occasional traipses into the creepypasta horror stylings of Slenderman and imscared, I was a little concerned that Undertale was one of these vampire games: Not games that fed on the player, but games that transformed us into blood suckers, desperate to drain every last ounce of life from a game in an act of determined superfandom.īut somewhere along the way, Undertale went from a mild disappointment to one of my favorite games so far this year. And unlike The Stanley Parable, which iterated in fairly rapid succession, the notion of completing Undertale multiple times felt daunting. But in the era of Jazzpunk, Frog Fractions, and The Stanley Parable, a game can’t get by on the novelty of having jokes any more than a television comedy could. Yeah, it had silly skeleton men, and it referenced anime and dating sims. The game's comedy wasn’t quite hitting for me either. Like the final level of Braid or Spec Ops: The Line, Undertale was a sledghammer critique, while I'd been hoping for some local anesthesia and a scalpel. I appreciated the intention: Undertale was taking aim at familiar console-style RPG tropes like experience points, block puzzles, and shopkeepers, but this style of subversion had lost its edge. But, through my first two hours, the game itself didn’t manage to achieve that feat. There were so many arguments for why I should be paying attention to Undertale, and each felt custom made to hook me. I was told that it was weird in the best way, like how Suda 51 games used to be. ![]() ![]() I was told that Undertale saw the beauty in mundanity, like Earthbound did. I was told that Undertale was funny, and that it was subversive, and that there were lots of cool, little secrets for dedicated players to find, including dramatically different ending sequences. ![]() But so many people had told me that I should play-that I needed to play-this game. It was a Saturday night, and I couldn’t stop thinking of better ways that I could be spending my time. If you're desperate for a 'tl dr' for this review, well, here it is. ![]()
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