Undertale - Review @ RPGCodex

RPG Codex Review: Undertale

This year, away from the watchful eyes of the RPG Codex, a new game took the place of the Highest Rated PC Game of All Time on Metacritic. It scored 97, one point above icons of fanboyism like BioShock, Half-Life 2 and GTA V.

It has since dropped down to 93 (this is a serious industry, after all, with big budget AAA rehashes at its apex), but that remains an impressive feat. The game that achieved it? Undertale, an indie RPG.

Yes, reader - an RPG! But how come it has eluded thousands of RPG Codex grognards? Let's check out the trailer to see if we can learn more:

Yeah... uh... quite easy to see why few here cared.

But here's my honest assessment: if you find that trailer in any way appealing, if you enjoy games like Earthbound and/or if you have a weak spot for unique games that offer something fresh, then heed my advice - stop reading this review and go play Undertale. Or at least try the demo.

TL;DR: Undertale is a brilliant game, and the less you know about it before going in, the better.

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sakichop said:

I have to agree with HHR on this one. I only played the demo and it was one of the worst games I've played.

I know it sounds like hyperbole but I really can't think of another game I've tried that I thought was this bad.

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Due to the limited nature of player agency, attempting to interrogate moral questions in videogames can be a challenging proposition. To put it another way: how can I have made the wrong choice if it’s a decision the game forced me to make? Repeatedly, Undertale throws the player into unavoidable boss fights, where negotiation is not an option. These fights can be won nonviolently, but only through puzzle solving. Like my fight against Toriel, these conflicts require the player to take advantage of hidden mechanics, repeat actions without knowing whether or not they’ll succeed, and subsist under a barrage of enemy attacks. (Relatedly, when the player does not fight, they don’t gain experience, which means their health remains incredibly low, making the unavoidable combat even more challenging.)

The player’s choice, then, to fight or not to fight, is not one necessarily related to roleplaying or ethical considerations. It’s also a mechanical consideration. A failure to deliver mercy might simply be a failure to solve a puzzle, or figure out a way to survive with inadequate resources. In my case, it was a decision made because the game did not effectively communicate to me that I could do anything else. I wasn’t making my choices as a moral actor. I was making them as a player. I encountered this problem over and over during my playthrough. Every boss fight was not a question of, “Do I want to kill this individual?” It was a question of, “Can I solve this puzzle? Do I have the resources to survive long enough to deliver mercy before Game Over?”

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The constraints of Undertale‘s nonviolent combat, then, might suggest something similar, highlighting the way that choosing not to fight is a profound risk, not to be taken lightly. Their presence in a system, though, one which has carefully constructed each choice and then determined how those choices are communicated to the player, however, suggests something different. It suggests a communicative failure, one brought about by the nature of the system itself. The charming, morally earnest rhetoric of Undertale conceals the coercive weaknesses of its systemic approach to those same moral issues. Its limited combat options and often obtuse puzzle solving, alongside the sheer endurance required to survive boss fights long enough to end them, add up to a system that doesn’t point to any elaborate moral insight. It simply points to itself.

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