Undertale review

Exceptional

by Hisurane

Overall: 4/10
Gameplay: 3/10
Story: 5/10
Music: 7/10

TLDR: Undertale is a massively overhyped game. The story is far less innovative than people say, relying on cheap hat tricks instead of making you (or the writers) put in any real emotional labor. Its philosophy is simple, and better told by other games. The gameplay itself is boring, involves largely walking around and memorizing patterns, and it has little replay value. Do not recommend.


I thought I knew what overhyped meant, and then I played Undertale. It's a game that is best left in the 2010s, and is wrought with cheap story tricks to feign philosophical deepness. But I suppose that should be no surprise, coming from a person who's start was on the Homestuck team. Let's start with the mechanics. The gameplay is absolutely horrible. It's rarely fun, and when it is it's because of cheap story tricks that keep you engaged in SPITE of the underlying mechanics still being awful. The game's core challenges revolve around mastering a particular set of button presses for different characters and allow for none of your own innovation in playstyle. If you don't do it the intended way, you can't do it at all. It comes down to rote memorization of the different challenges. If you liked Guitar Hero, perhaps you'll enjoy this, but if you were hoping for interesting puzzles, any modicum of strategy, or gameplay that doesn't get stale after the first 30 minutes, you're better of looking elsewhere. Even the graphics feel uninteresting and lazy. There were better looking 16-bit games released in the 90s, and it feels like the designer tried to use the "artsy-indie-game" card as an excuse for shitty visuals.

(No spoilers here, don't worry.) Now let's talk about where the game gets, supposedly, interesting: the story. Many people take it to be revelatory in its meta-narrative, and in the twists and turns it throws at you. Yes, there are moments that deviate from what the typical hero's journey would have you expect. You are able to be consequential choices that impact the way characters relate to you later in the game. But the consequences feel hollow, and the plot could have been written by a middle-schooler who just watched The Matrix or Inception for the first time. I've seen some reviewers discuss the way it is meant to be a commentary on games, gaming, and gamer culture. They talk about the beautiful simplicity of the twists, the way in which you are supposed to identify with certain characters and be emotionally wrenched around by what you uncover so that you question your own choices and identities as a gamer. This couldn't be further from reality. The characters are never fleshed out enough to make you feel any attachment, and any interesting philosophical observations the game might hold about the relation of the player to a game's narrative and characters was told better, more succinctly, and with profoundly more gravitas in the Stanley Parable... four years earlier. 

SPOILERS IN THIS PARAGRAPH: This sentence is to make sure you don't accidentally spoil something for yourself. Read on now. The character that you are supposed to feel the most connection to, Toriel, your 'mother' of sorts, is from the beginning obviously going to be the emotional wrenching point. But even in this respect, they fail to make the stakes feel high enough, and her character complexity falls flat when it comes time to really make it shine. The whole thing with the pacifist/genocide/normal routes is, once again, a cheap trick. It doesn't buy the game any more replayability, and although some of the dialogue is different, it still feels like you are playing the same game a second and third time to no avail. Any moral lesson that one could pretend to glean from it either isn't actually as innovative as the fanbase likes to think (it has all been done by many another game, including the pacifist-option idea) OR is, once again, philosophically uninteresting. Flowey being evil is the most predictable twist, the meta-narrative of the game quitting itself is, while a clever trick, exactly that: a trick. It adds quite little to the lackluster story, which tries to convince you it has deep meaning by appealing to the most rudimentary storytelling devices. 

Overall, terrible game. While I won't discourage playing it for everyone, it is certainly not as universally lovable as it may seem from the discourse around it. It is at best a mediocre experiment in simple storytelling that should be left forgotten in the "used games" pile at your local Gamestop.