Undertale
I finished this a couple days ago, and let it percolate because I was too braindead to muster coherent commentary immediately. That, in fact, may still be true, but I have nothing better to do now.
That was the best and also the worst video game I've played in a long time. But mostly the best.
Most people's reviews, as well as the game's own marketing, emphasize the pacifism vs violence choices and multiple playthrough aspects. I think that is nonsensical and a regrettably poor choice of things to focus on. Those aspects are not very well developed or engaging at all. It's the usual indie game pacifism Hitler vs Jesus dynamic, with nothing particularly new or compelling to say on the subject. Fenrir and Gourry covered all that pretty well already, if people are interested just go back and read their posts (including the spoilers, which honestly aren't very spoilery). But in a single normal playthrough by someone who likes the game, none of that stuff is going to matter in the slightest.
Undertale is probably the best written and most detailed game I've ever played. Every single character, every single music track, every single NPC, every single random "enemy," every single room, every single action and line and thing that a player might possibly do are placed perfectly and then showered in polish and attention. It's rare to see an interaction where the interface ISN'T breaking in some way. It begs the player to get immersed, to enjoy the game world and take it seriously, and to also break the fourth wall and not take it too seriously and then use THAT as a way to take it MORE seriously... and it puts more effort towards all that end than any other game. Planescape: Torment has nothing on the artfulness and earnesty of this game. Bioshock Infinite spends the entire game trying and trying to make the player love companion NPC Elizabeth, but Undertale can make you care more about a random one-off encounter with just a few lines of text and sprite art.
There are a million tiny things I could talk about and I don't even know where to begin. This is a bar raiser for me. Every future game I play, I'm going to have to look at aspects and compare them and go "well, this would've been a 10/10 game for its realization of atmosphere, but really, it's no Undertale..."
It's also a terrible game that falls completely flat if you don't get into it. The mechanics are weak and poorly explained. Very often you're choosing options at random, with no clue as to what they do, whether you're doing the right thing and just need to do it more, or figure out something, or perhaps nothing you do matters and you just need to survive X turns, or maybe it's a plot fight and you need to get hit, etc etc. Movement is slow and there's no run button and scant fast travel until the endgame. There are no technical options of any sort, except fullscreen vs windowed, and the game hogs more resources than a Source engine FPS. And if you ever fall out of emotional immersion, or never got immersed in the first place, then suddenly you become the sarcastic teenager walking through the haunted house rolling their eyes, and there is no fun to be had anywhere.
Such are the perils of going for emotional engagement and depth: you can't please everyone. What is deeply meaningful for some groups of people is an unintelligible turnoff for others. It's a familiar problem in the psychological horror and character-heavy dating sim genres, and it's no coincidence that those are the genres Undertale most resembles and pays regular homage to (the surface disguise of "RPG" lasts about 30 seconds). This is also why triple-A mass market games so rarely even attempt similar themes. They're very risky, and indeed, Undertale is not for everyone. I'm not sure I would recommend it to most of the DL, honestly.
This is a game where there is an enemy named Tsunderplane. It is a jet plane wearing a mob cap, and it is definitely not jealous that the other enemies in its formation are paying attention to do. To defeat Tsunderplane, you must get close to it (but not too close), accept its gifts graciously, and wait patiently for it to work out its issues and figure out that it wasn't really attacted to you, but to the idea of being in love with you. If reading that makes you crack a smile and giggle, maybe look up what a mob cap is, you will like this game. If you are more concerned about what exactly you need to press to do those things, or you're just rolling your eyes because you believe that anime isn't real... you're gonna have a bad time. And that's ok.
For me personally, my buttons were pushed, and pushed hard, from the beginning all the way to the end. I cried a river during all the final battles. The only major disappointment I felt at the end was that the game was too easy. For supposedly being bullet hell inspired, and pushing a "pacifism is rewarding" theme, it sure didn't make a convincing case. Pacifism never felt like a difficult choice to make, and there was only one fight in the entire game where shmup skills felt like they even came into play and helped me.
But then Gatewalker talked about the game, raging about the difficulty of that exact fight and how it made him feel punished for having gone pacifist and not gaining levels. So apparently it DOES work, it just didn't work for me because I'm too experienced or w/e. That made me feel a lot better. It made him want to quit playing, because it broke his emotional immersion. So. Best and worst.
