LogFAQs > #933444527

#3





Years of release: 2015 (PC), 2017 (PS4/Vita), 2018 (Switch)
Beaten?: Yes

(You're going to have to excuse me for my over-the-top sentimentality. This is where I'm about to be ridiculously enthusiastic about a five-hour game about skeletons and goats.)

Sometimes, when I'm lying awake at night and alone with my thoughts, I like to peer past the space of things that exist and imagine the infinite worlds of things that don't exist. It fucks with my head a little to imagine just how limited our exploration of all the possible games that could exist actually is - all of the ones that have been created are a particular creative expression of one person or a few people or a few hundred people, but for every such expression that does take the shape of a finished game, there are thousands, millions, countless numbers of creative expressions and possible cerative expressions that have never seen the light of day. When I hit a stumbling block in my own artistic endeavors, either due to challenges or a lack of motivation, this is something that keeps me going; knowing that if I don't create the thing I'm setting out to create, nobody will. If I get very lucky, some of my dream projects might get made by someone else (hi, Cadence of Hyrule), but no project will ever be made that is exactly the way I would have made it, had I seen it to the end, and I feel a little bit of a sense of duty tugging at me to see that project given birth and expressed to the world.

This decade, for me, is split neatly into two halves: pre-Undertale, and post-Undertale. Everything before Undertale might as well be ancient, a relic of a long-past generation. Everything after Undertale is basically current. And then Undertale itself somehow seems to exist in a timeless place - it both feels like it must've been there my whole life, and at the same time I feel like I played it just yesterday. In reality, Undertale a little over 4 years old, and that fact manages to blow my mind from both angles; how can it be that recent, how can it be that old? I still feel a little bit like I'm basking in the afterglow of having just played it for the first time, and at the same time, it is really bizarre to imagine a world in which this game didn't exist, in which Toby Fox never made this project and never introduced it to our culture. A little superlative, sure, but I don't care. Undertale is GameFAQs's greatest game of all time, isn't it? I happen to think that pick has aged pretty well!

I think pretty much everyone is at least basically familiar with Undertale at this point and won't be surprised to learn I'm among the throngs who considered it, if not a life-changing experience, at least something relatively profound. Among cute, narratively-driven games with adorable characters, simple but clever gameplay mechanics, and a few really good twists and gimmicks, Undertale knows no peer. The characters aren't just memorable; they're iconic. The music isn't just good; it's a video game music staple. The gameplay isn't just fun; it does a few things that change how I think about games. The game isn't just good, it's woven into the fabric of gaming's canon. Yeah, that's a lot to put on this short little indie title and I know that overhyping it really doesn't do the game any favors, but I don't care, this is my list and this is how I feel about it.

Sometimes I wonder what Toby Fox was thinking when he made this game. Did he know that everyone was gonna love it or did he think that was he was making was completely a personal pet project that would only ever matter to him? I'm always kind of fascinated by games that are the visions of a single developer, which is a category the last two games on my list also fall into. I dunno, there's just something so damn pure about Undertale, the way it so effortlessly carries the unique voice of the single person who wrote it - well, ok, there's two, since there was an artist, but it still feels very much like something nobody but they could have created.

I don't even know what's so damn good about it. I mean, if I tried to describe the game it would probably sound pretty lame. But everything about it just landed so well for me. Everything about it was just so damn charming and clever in a way that I just don't see very often. I talked about a-ha moments in puzzle games, but this game has a lot of similar sort of moments - in this case, the a-ha moments were as simple as jokes that landed really well, details or secrets hidden in surprising places, events in the game's absurd plot that made me go 'oh wow, so that's what they decided to do next.'

I talked about my concept of the easter egg hunt with Stanley Parable - games where the primary purpose of the gameplay is to have a playful conversation with the devs themselves, trying to uncover fun, irrelevant secrets hidden in the game's most obscure corners, looking for different ways to make the game respond to your actions, taking delight when you realize that the dev thought that you might do that and included a unique response. The old masters of this genre, for me, are Super Mario RPG and the first two Paper Mario games, which are teeming with bizarre easter eggs in just about every possible nook and cranny - Undertale is the new master. Every time I play the game or see it played, and it's been a few times now, I learn something new about the game I didn't know before - some dialog option I hadn't considered, some action during an event I hadn't tried, some secret buried way deep in the furthest possible spots. Out of all the things I like about Undertale, and there's a lot of things to like about Undertale, this is probably my favorite part.

But, also, I love the characters, I love the music, I love the gameplay even if it's very simple and leaves a lot of unexplored space. I love the stuff that happens in this game, which I dare not spoil; yes, even now I still care about not spoiling Undertale! The less said about it, the better, really. And yet I still can't help but overhype it. It's hard, okay? I've spent the last four years not wanting to express how much I love this game too much to avoid giving people the wrong impression about how good it is (in reality, your mileage may vary, and it's better if you think this game sucks and you're surprised). But now that I'm writing this list I don't feel like doing that anymore, so suck it. You've probably made up your mind one way or the other, but I do really hope that if you're still feeling sore about Undertale winning the games contest that you'll be able to look past that and appreciate the game for what it is. It's a beautiful, lovingly-crafted piece of work and it doesn't deserve to have