For most games, patch notes that read “Updated on Steam to fix bugs and increase compatibility” would be a nonstarter. Ignorable. Useless.
But Undertale [official site] is not most games. More importantly, Undertale’s community is not like most communities. And thus Undertale’s Patch 1.001 bug fixes and increased compatibilities have been picked apart over the last couple days to reveal secret spaghetti or other such nonsense. Spoilers ahead.
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Undertale [official site] is a brilliant game and I want everyone to play it. I worry that people will think it’s so deeply rooted in nostalgia that they’ll need a degree in RPGs to enjoy it, or that it’s a series of quirky in-jokes. It isn’t but I don’t want to tell you precisely what it is – I want you to see for yourself. To that end, I’ve had a big conversation with myself to answer some doubts concerns that those of you who haven’t yet played might be harbouring. There are no spoilers.
RPS Feature The one game you should play this month
You can defeat Game of the Month by pointing out that it’s running a week late, but you could also progress by claiming friendship and offering Game of the Month a hug. As it is here, so it is in inventive, uplifting RPG Undertale [official site]. As a human cast down into monster territory, you must explore and quest and combat, but can do all of them with kindness instead of violence. Drawing plentiful comparisons to EarthBound, it’s the one game you should play this month if you only have time to play one.
I double-take when I see the sign on the front of the library. Something feels off, and I peer at the screen, and there’s definitely an extra letter that’s snuck in there somewhere. The little town of Snowdin is, as the name suggests, blanketed in thick snow, and the lights in the windows of the library look warm. Inside, the librarian looks up at me tiredly. “Welcome to Snowdin library,” she says. “Yes, we know the sign is mis-spelled.”
There is something irrepressibly charming about this.
Undertale [official site], a game made mostly by Toby Fox, begins with a muted cutscene that feels immediately and deliberately evocative of The Wind Waker’s opening mural. “Long ago,” read the subtitles, “two races ruled over earth. HUMANS and MONSTERS.” And then there’s a little picture: a horned furry creature on the left and a cloaked human on the right. The human is holding a spear. The stage continues to be set with that particular blunt efficiency of the older Zelda games; there was a war, the monsters were defeated, they were sealed beneath the mountain. Years pass. A human child, the protagonist, climbs a mountain and falls down an enormous hole. Then the game begins.
Many games nowadays are keen to tell you they’ll remember your decisions, but the old demo for Undertale [official site] is one of the few games I’ve seen that remembered everything – across all playthroughs. It’s a surreal and charming RPG about a human trapped in a world of monsters where, sure, you could battle ‘em, or you could chat and cheer and flirt with them instead. And, in the demo it least, it remembered and offered a few unpleasant twists on later playthroughs.
Two years after its Kickstarter, Undertale launched today. What surprises await?
I checked out Undertale’s demo last week and I strongly suggest that you do the same. It’s in the category of games that I’d call ‘surrole-playing games weird RPGs’, an unruly gang containing the likes of Space Funeral, unexpected adventures that revel in their retro postmodernism. As well as a surreal, funny and touching story, Undertale has random encounters that are actually fun, with a smart bullet hell (or at least bullet heck) minigame to settle combat. But there’s no need for fisticuffs at all because every encounter can be settled through conversation and understanding of body language, which is slightly more difficult when your opponent is a sexy jelly. The Kickstarter has almost hit its $5,000 goal in the time it took me to go to the shops, return and make a sandwich. Still, take a look.
