Game:

Undertale (2015)

Category:

Review

Duration: 11:14

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I finished my first playthrough of Undertale in stunned silence. My journey had begun with dumb puns and silly puzzles, but the end affected me in a way I never expected. That’s kind of Undertale’s specialty — playing with our expectations of what an RPG should be, subverting them, and using them to drive a story unique to what games can do. Its strong writing, integration of gameplay with storytelling, and acute understanding of its audience all build to something that surprises at every turn.As a lone human fallen into an underground world that serves as a prison for monsters, I had my journey laid out for me, as most RPG protagonists do. For my first playthrough I took a pacifist approach, being as kind and merciful as possible as I searched for a way back to the surface. But I made a mistake: I accidentally killed a monster in the beginning. So I restarted without saving, as I would in any other game when I needed a do-over. Except… things were different this time. Dialogue had changed to reflect that I’d seen her die. Then Flowey, Undertale’s chaotic evil, fourth wall-breaking flower, tore into me for having the gall to abuse the power of the save state.Undertale expected me to have played RPGs before and played with those conventions in unexpected ways. That first berating from Flowey shaped the rest of my experience — I learned I couldn’t bank on a soft reset, so I had to tread carefully. Everything I did mattered. That clever manipulation of gameplay mechanics adds weight to a story that couldn’t have been told in any other way or medium. Undertale has to be a game, and that’s the key to its brilliance.Its dodging-based combat minigames especially rely on that concept. Boss battles consistently subverted my expectations, even after I thought I’d figured everything out, but even run-of-the-mill random encounters are closely intertwined with storytelling and worldbuilding. Every enemy has a unique personality expressed both through combat and non-combative options. In my pacifist run I ended up talking to a lot of monsters, giving out hugs, and even (and especially) flirting with them to avoid killing them. In order to spare a monster that wanted to flirt but didn’t want to admit it, I had to “get close but not too close.” That option changed the rules of combat so that I had to narrowly dodge incoming projectiles… until the monster blushed so much that it stopped fighting.There are tons of jokes that appeal to internet nerds, and I often felt like Undertale was talking directly to me, like it knew what I was thinking. An anime-loving character’s “selfie,” for example, is actually a picture of a garbage can with pink sparkle filters over it (and speaking from experience, this is very accurate). I especially love Undertale’s humor when it has something to say, however subtle. I entered a snail race (called Thundersnail) and was told to press Z repeatedly to encourage my snail to win. I spammed Z until she burst into flames, and the Thundersn
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Source: http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/08/15/undertale-review

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