Undertale
Developer: TobyFox
Platform: PC, Mac
Nominations: Best Role-Playing Game, Best Independent Game, Best Art Direction, Games for Impact
If you haven’t played this game yet, I envy you. The only thing left I wish from my experience with Undertale would be the ability to play it for the first time again, with the naivety of what was in store for me when I first entered the ruins of a forgotten world of polite monsters. More than any game I’ve played before, Undertale fantastically connects players to the characters on the screen through unique design, memorable moments, and some of the highest quality music in a game all year.
Among the first you meet, Sans and Papyrus the skeleton brothers, are probably my favorites due to their obsession with puns, puzzles and spaghetti, but spending time with any of these characters, even the scariest ones, give them their opportunity to make you adore them as much as the last.
Plus, the combat system is unlike anything I’ve played in an RPG before. This is a game that forces you to look at the way you play a video game from a different perspective. While this game looks like it would be mechanically simple, there is so much happening in the background where dialogue variations in your narrative are the most fluid I’ve ever seen in a game to date. In fact, it makes decision based gameplay in Mass Effect look stapled together. Undertale keeps tabs on whether you’re a pacifist or a murderer, and your time in the underground will end accordingly, and despite the fact that the game’s proper ending doesn’t come until you’ve played a second time, during which you’ll be sparing every monster’s soul, any crime you committed is remembered in the “alternate timeline” to crudely put it. Your inclination to simply kill in a video game is challenged by Undertale by creating permanent consequences to your save file.
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This is a game that sticks with you more as time goes on, and by the time you’ve realized just how much you loved it, the time you’ve spent with it will have been far in the past. – Evan Griffin
Link to Evan’s full review of Undertale
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