I've also notched two playthroughs of
Undertale, and it's pretty remarkable for a number of reasons. A lot of people have described it as similar to Earthbound, and it is, but I feel that there's more to it. I enjoyed Earthbound's world, but it has a lot of strange non-sequiturs that don't necessarily serve much purpose. Undertale has its own share of strangeness, but it is all serving the development of the world, specifically your relationship to its characters, and your knowledge of and connection to these characters is paramount depending on your playstyle.
It's getting press as a game where you don't have to fight at all. You can befriend monsters and bosses in battle, but you have to probe their mood and their characteristics before sparing them (in most instances, making it so they they don't want to fight you any longer). You can also take the route where you kill everything you see as in all other RPGs, and unlike in other games, your choice of violence vs pacifism has a very stark effect on the world, not through branching paths but through how the world ends up perceiving *you*. There is a very intensive moral compass, and the characters in the game and the game itself keeps track of all of your decisions, even if you savescum. Sometimes it's subtle, like a line or a small event change, or sometimes the whole tenor of a scene is recontextualized if you've decided to be violent (and people will comment on you if you're murderous, saying that your have a blank emotionless stare).
The main reason why I think the game is remarkable is because of its emotional sincerity and resonance. The scenes leading up to the opening title card are masterful (I think this is basically the demo), in ways that I cannot elaborate on for fear of spoiling. The game's message and morality lessons are pretty simple and perhaps a bit on the nose but they are told extremely well by gameplay mechanics. It is rewarding but difficult to be nice and befriend people, and that's shown in more difficult encounters when you have to spend a couple turns avoiding your enemies' attacks (combat mostly involves a bullet-hell like avoiding of enemy projectiles) before being able to befriend them. On a pacifistic run, you don't get experience for killing people, so you don't gain LVs and thus your HP will never increase. On the other hand, it is pretty easy but numbing to kill everything in your path. Depending on your choices, the game consists of emotional highs or stark darkness with in depth examinations of sociopathy. I think any game that is capable doing both well is worth a look, and it's only $10. It's kind of hard to talk about further without spoiling anything and it's kind of annoying because there actually is so much shit to talk about but it's basically impossible to talk about things I would want to recommend without ruining part of the experience. But, like, seriously, there is some Dark Souls level speculation already about all that is laid in in this world.
*There's a skeleton character named Sans who is basically Fen.
*This game has the worst goddamn, most groan inducing puns in the world, many of them skeleton related.
*The way you spare two dudebro guards is to get them to admit they are gay.
*There's a skeleton dating sim and he has pictures of his biceps and the biceps are wearing sunglasses.
*The game's art style may not be to everyone's taste, but it actually does quite a lot in terms of conveying emotion using very simple changes to a few pixels here and there.
*I don't think encounters are truly random but somewhat set. If you kill everything you see, NPCs in the real world don't appear in towns later, so this game doesn't fuck around when it comes to choice. You can find entire towns unpopulated if you're particularly violent.
*There's a FFVI opera scene with a homicidal robot as Celes.
*As an example of dealing with enemies, there's one enemy whose description is that he seems evil but he might be with the wrong crowd. He usually comes with other enemies and will attack you relentlessly until you spare everybody but him, and then he just flaps his arms.
The game's only ten bucks and I recommend it without reservation.
The most excruciating choice in video games:
Trenchant political commentary:
Spoiler talk
Okay, so the first time I played this, I only knew that you could talk yourself out of battles, but the section with Toriel is really good. She literally hand holds you through tutorial sections and shows you game mechanics, like how to spare enemies. She is just a matronly figure for you, making you pies you like, and she has built up a space for you to stay forever (why did the skeleton want a friend? because she was feeling bonely!!! Har har har). This seems boring and as your character, you only have options asking how to get out. She then takes you to the basement and says that others have died underground and that you had to go through her to get out. You fight her, and I thought that with RPG logic that this was a scripted encounter where the point was to teach you that the world is terrible sometimes and that sometimes killing is unavoidable, so after trying to talk or spare a few times, I start attacking her. She uses a lot of magic attacks that are tough to avoid as a first time player, and it seems that you have to attack her to stop it all. And then, something changes. She uses magic but it falls in a barrier like pattern around you, never touching your character. Toriel cannot get herself to hurt you and is basically accepting death, and this is a perfect example of gameplay mechanics telling story/revealing character. I killed her and then I find that you didn't have to, and I felt fucking terrible about it, but I don't savescum (the game will know if you start over and do this differently). I made my choice and felt like a piece of shit for it, and that strengthened a resolve to avoid killing for the rest of the playthrough, and that's what I did before doing a true pacifist ending next.
*The ending of the neutral path (some killing) involves some Metal Gear Solid-esque interface screw, closing the game from Steam several times and turning into a weird 2D shooter with 3D models of a monster plant. It's pretty gnarly. The characters in the game acknowledge the existence of saving and loading, and this happens in this encounter with the final boss several times, where he is clearly savestating to hit you over and over again. This part is pretty awesome.
*The final encounter on the pacifist run is very Giygas-esque, where there is a hopeless fight and your friends have been absorbed and you have to save them by acting on things that had defined your friendship, like telling horrible puns or making shitty spaghetti, but it is these character moments from the game that have established your attachment to these characters. The music in this is awesome and carries the scenes emotionally.
*The game knows your choices and whether you've killed, and it will know if you reset. You can still get any ending on a replay, but that changes things here and there and it changes the ending, so going no mercy to true pacifist will color the true pacifist ending because you know what you did you fucking monster and the game knows too.
*Anime's not fucking real, that's a load of shit.
*After doing the pacifist ending, you get a message at the end not to restart the world because that is the happiest end state and to start things over would be cruel, and this is very Spec Ops: The Line-like where the right thing to do is to stop playing the game. I then watched a bit of a genocide run, and it is completely unpalatable to me. I could not stomach killing Papyrus. It really reflects the character attachment you end up getting where the notion of these characters dying by your hand just feels so wrong. Later, Undyne is shown to be the heroine with undying resolve against you, the monstrous antagonist of the game. This is when it basically becomes Orsted's rampage in Live a Live, where you are too far gone and have killed too much, and the world is evacuating to escape your senseless wrath. I don't think I will ever do a genocide run. At the end, Flowey talks about doing similar things as you, where he chose to make everyone happy and then started killing just because he wanted to see what would happen, and this is a reflection on the player and on just general game tropes where we become blank eyed killing machines so that numbers go up. It also plays on the concept of EX(perience) and LV (level of violence) on a rather on the nose way, but it does reflect that this "determination" that you have can cut both ways and isn't necessarily a force for good.
*Sans is a character who obviously knows more than he lets on no matter what path you choose ("you're gonna have a bad time"), even though he plays incompetent and likes annoying people. He is basically the final boss of a genocide run and he looks incredibly fucking hard.
*There is so much speculation and lore going on with this game. For example, the equipment that you find is themed (tutu & ballet shoes) and may be linked to the previous six humans. People going through the data have also found a guy named Dr. Gaster who has lines and stuff but we don't know what his role was.
