Undertale - Review @ GiantBomb

Another very positive review for the indie sleeper hit of 2015 - Undertale:

Undertale combines charming characters, smart writing, and a unique combat system to make one of this fall's biggest surprises.

Two hours into Undertale I was waning. It was a Saturday night, and I couldn’t stop thinking of better ways that I could be spending my time. But so many people had told me that I should play--that I needed to play--this game.

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. I was told that Undertale saw the beauty in mundanity, like Earthbound did. I was told that it was weird in the best way, like how Suda 51 games used to be. There were so many arguments for why I should be paying attention to Undertale, and each felt custom made to hook me. But, through my first two hours, the game itself didn’t manage to achieve that feat.

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. Like the final level of Braid or Spec Ops: The Line, Undertale was was a sledghammer critique, while I'd been hoping for some local anesthesia and a scalpel. The game's comedy wasn’t quite hitting for me either. Yeah, it had silly skeleton men, and it referenced anime and dating sims. 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. And unlike The Stanley Parable, which iterated in fairly rapid succession, the notion of completing Undertale multiple times felt daunting. 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.

But somewhere along the way, Undertale went from a mild disappointment to one of my favorite games so far this year. To explain how it did this, I have to talk more about the game's structure and detail. Don’t worry, I’m not out to give away story beats or to ruin punchlines. But if I failed to talk about the shape of Undertale (and about what it manages to achieve with that shape), I’d be doing a disservice to it. It deserves more than to be talked about in hushed and devout whispers, and trust me, someone could spell the game out in vivid detail and fail to steal its magic. [...]

Score: 5/5

Thanks Eye!