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Undertale

March 24, 2017

It's the truism of our time: the internet will find a way to ruin everything you like. This has the same steadfast reliability to it as Rule 34 (the invented--but nonetheless utterly true--idea that, if something exists, there is smut dedicated to it). And it makes sense: the internet is vast and deep and, ultimately, if you stare into the void, something unpleasant will come bubbling to the surface. Or sometimes it's less subtle than that. (See: your fave is problematic)

For example, you: 1) play Portal; 2) think: "Oh man, this game is awesome;" and 3) decide to do a quick Google search about the game and BLAM, suddenly you're neck deep in "The Cake is a Lie" jokes that go on forever and ever. Inundated with so much garbage, it becomes easy to forgot why you liked the game in the first place. The subtleties are replaced with one joke repeated ad nauseum until the words don't even seem like words anymore.

I'd argue that the same thing happened to Undertale, a 2015 game put out by Toby Fox and lovingly styled after Japanese role-playing games ("JRPGs") like Earthbound. If you were curious about the game and decided to do a quick search on Tumblr, I'd guess that your reaction would be, "How did an 8-bit skeleton in slippers become a sex symbol?"

But, despite all the grey noise that now exists about it on the internet, there's a reason Undertale reached Portal levels of internet adoration: they're both unexpected things of beauty in the simplest of wrappings.

READ MORE.

Tags game review, undertale

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