RPGRabbit Enjoins You to Do Yourself a Favor and Play Undertale Immediately

I neglect my Steam games far too frequently. I own almost ninety of the damn things. I’ve played perhaps a handful of them; beaten only a scant few. However, the desire to acquire games remains strong within me, an addiction that Valve is only too happy to enable through their periodic and highly gamified Steam Sales.

I’ve been very good this year during the Steam Winter Sale! I haven’t yet purchased a single thing! Some of my friends and students, on the other hand, have been gifting me yet more games. Well, that doesn’t count, right? If I didn’t buy them? Of course not. And obviously, if someone has spent a bit of coin on a game to bring me joy, I most certainly owe it to them to play the game right away!

One of my students bought me Undertale, a game that has been on my Steam Wishlist since I read a very positive review of it in my October Game Informer. The review was rhapsodic in its praise of the game, but gave few specifics, explaining that too many details would ruin the game’s surprises. My interest was piqued, but I forgot about it until the game appeared in my inventory last week.

As I was stuck at my family’s house for Christmas, and I was experiencing a deadly combination of jet lag, insomnia, and being forced to sleep on the living room floor, I played a lot of Undertale in lieu of slumber.

I would argue that playing Undertale might have been better than sleeping.

The game, by indie developer Toby Fox, was a successfully-funded 2013 Kickstarter project. Fox’s goal was $5,000. He received a total of $51,124. He developed every aspect of the game on his own, a process that took a little over two and a half years. The finished game was released in September of this year, at which point everyone who played it collectively lost their shit.

The Game Informer review had the right idea; if I reveal too many details about the plot and a few of its gameplay aspects, some of Undertale’s mind-blowing charm will be irrevocably sullied. I think, however, that I can share enough to build a compelling argument as to why you (and everyone you know) should play this game right now.

The jumping-off point for the plot is that long ago, humans sealed the monster race underground with magic. You play as a small, pudgy human child of indiscriminate age and gender who has fallen from above into the world of monsters. The game chronicles your journey to return to the land of the humans. While on the surface this seems pretty straightforward, the game quickly breaks its 8-bit RPG mold, bending genre conventions and slyly breaking the fourth wall in in startling and unexpected ways. What sorts of ways? I’m not going to tell you. You’re just going to have to play the damn game and figure it out for yourself.

If you yet stubbornly cling to your skepticism, here are some other reasons that you should play this game that I am actually willing to share.

For one thing, the game is hauntingly beautiful for an 8-bit game. Fox made some really lovely design choices, letting the limits of the retro art style work for him. Exploring Undertale’s environments is a magical, otherworldly journey. Adding to this dreamlike quality is the truly excellent soundtrack. I’m very fond of 8-bit music, and Fox’s beautiful work stands among the greats, with tunes that evoke in me an excitement and wonder similar to the soundtracks of the early Final Fantasy games. This is high praise indeed, and lest you think I hyperbolize, give this track a listen.

The gameplay is equally compelling. Simple puzzles and interesting dialogue interactions encourage you to take a look at everything in this weird, wonderful, and frequently humorous world.

A world that is occasionally decidedly and unrepentantly weird.

Like the RPGs of old, Undertale has random encounters, though never so many that they at any point become tedious.

Although the battle system is ostensibly turn-based, it adds a few fascinating wrinkles to that tried-and-true RPG standby. Most interestingly, there are lots of options in combat that do not involve actual fighting. Negotiation is possible with your enemies, though you need to take into account their personal proclivities in order to get anywhere, in a diplomacy system not unlike the demon negotiations present in most of the core Shin Megami Tensei games.

In addition to having a great many unique combat options, the battle system itself is not purely menu-based. After you select an option, you must stay on your toes to dodge the attacks of the monsters you encounter in fast-paced tiny levels of miniaturized bullet hell.

Some of these attacks are pretty tricky to dodge (and frankly, I suck at them), but it makes for tense and fun battles that rarely become too frustrating.

I have thoroughly enjoyed every minute of my time with Undertale so far. It constantly surprises me, a rarity in RPG games. Spending time in its ethereal, pixelated environments reminds me of my earliest experiences with interactive entertainment, filled constantly with delightful surprises and strange beauty.

You have absolutely zero excuses to avoid playing this game. It isn’t too terribly long, it will run on almost any computer, and it’s on sale RIGHT NOW in the Steam Store. Really, go buy it right now. Play it. Be transported. Stay determined.

 

RPG Rabbit Buys Too Many Games in the Steam Sale; Plays Baldur’s Gate II Because Dice Told Her To

Oh, Steam Sale. What a wonderful and terrible thing you are.

Wonderful because OMG I JUST BOUGHT THIS GAME FOR $0.89!! 90% OFF FTW!

Terrible because OH DAMN HOW MUCH MONEY DID I ACCIDENTALLY SPEND AND NOW I OWN TWENTY MORE GAMES ON TOP OF THE 50 I ALREADY HAVEN’T PLAYED.

In fact, thanks to the Steam Family Library Sharing feature that I just discovered this week, there are now 94 games in my Steam Library. 94 games. And the sale isn’t even over yet! I think I’ve actually touched maybe ten of them. And I think I’ve beaten a grand total of 2. In the entire three years that I’ve been on Steam.

That is an abysmal track record. So I have devised a PLAN. I have a hundred games, give or take about 6. (And tomorrow is the final day of the Steam sale, so I may end up with an even hundred by this time tomorrow.) I also have a pair of d10s. Let’s roll these bitches and play a random game. And hope I don’t get a 95-100, because then I’ll have to buy more games.

Oh, good, a 5! I won’t have to count very far down my list, either. Let’s see, one, two, three, four, five…aha!

Our game for tonight appears to be Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition. Its enhancements will sadly be lost on me, as I have never experienced the unenhanced edition. Or any edition. Which is surprising, really. I’m not sure how I managed to completely miss the Baldur’s Gate games. After all, I really love Dungeons and Dragons. As the ready availability of d10s on my desk can attest. (For the curious, I play a changeling pacifist healer cleric of Melora and Kord in my husband’s weekly D&D game. Her name is Daenerys Californication because we generally play under the influence of far too much alcohol.)

Other than the fact that Baldur’s Gate is somehow a D&D game, the only other thing that I know about it is that it somehow involves a miniature giant space hamster named Boo that a dude keeps as a pet and holds carefully in one hand for the entire game. So I’m kind of looking forward to it. I expect to be disappointed by the true extent of Boo’s role in this game, as I am betting it’s going to be a hell of a lot smaller than I would like.

The game I wish I was playing.

Oh well, this will still be cool. Let’s go!

Oh snap, I’ve got options! I am assuming “Enhanced” translates to “Comes With All The Expansions.” So I’m just going to also assume that the first one here is the original game. To the Shadows of Amn

So after the game brings me up to speed with what I missed by not playing Baldur’s Gate 1 (apparently I am the offspring of the god of murder, which sounds pretty metal), I get to create a character! Yay, I love character creation.

I particularly appreciate their commitment to gender equality here in Amn.

The character creation system is pretty robust, and for someone unfamiliar with D&D, probably a confusing, clunky nightmare. I am not sure what edition of D&D this game’s mechanics are based upon (THACO? Wha??), but it’s definitely neither 3.5 nor 4E, the two editions I’ve played extensively. So I hope my character doesn’t end up being an ineffective mess.

I couldn’t resist playing a class that gets a tiny dragon as a pet! Nousagi here isn’t a very smart elf, but she knows she loves animals and hates demons! She shoots bows a lot and whacks things with big sticks. Sometimes she whacks people with two big sticks at once! She’s hardy and fairly pretty and has good common sense. She is moderately strong, and she is quite sneaky. She is kind and generally benevolent, but finds rules pesky and unnecessary. Hopefully she and her fairy dragon kick some demon ass!

Nousagi awakens inside a giant birdcage inside someone’s creepy dungeon. Some asshat with a vague British accent saunters over to her cage and starts throwing fireballs at her! That doesn’t seem very sporting, throwing fireballs at people in cages, now does it? He claims she will survive his “experiments” with no problem and that she is full of untapped power. Suddenly, a golem hurries in to warn his master that intruders approach. Aha, I bet Nousagi is about to get her ass rescued by the rest of her party.

Mr. Fireball makes himself scarce, and a woman named Imoen who claims to know Nousagi comes to free her from her prison. She says that she and Nousagi used to live near each other, and that they’ve been imprisoned by Mr. Fireball for an indeterminate amount of time. She implores her to hurry, but Nousagi is very curious and confused and asks a lot of questions. Imoen is clearly getting impatient, but answers them all readily enough. She thinks some assassins came after Mr. Fireball. She also tells Nousagi that there are two more allies trapped here and also where to find some gear they can all equip.

Controls are pretty straightforward; I click a party member, and then I click where I want them to go. I click Nousagi over to a loud man with a hilarious accent and anger problems named Minsc and Nousagi frees him from his cage.

Minsc has only said like three things so far, but he’s already well on his way to being my favorite character.

Everyone keeps referencing characters I don’t know and things that clearly happened in the last game (I guess Minsc’s…girlfriend(?) was killed in front of him, poor guy), so I’m wondering if I should have bought that one, too, and played it first, but the dice told me to play Baldur’s Gate II, so play it I will.

Also, Minsc keeps talking about…BOO! It can only be Boo the Space Hamster. Minsc and Boo must be bros. Come be in my party forever, Minsc, and talk crazy to me.

Well, that explains…everything?

The party gains 3000 experience for recruiting Minsc (and Boo!) and I send Nousagi over to meet Jaheira. I like how the game’s dialogue options are letting me roleplay Nousagi as having lost her memory to compensate for my having not played the first game. It’s a clever way to get around the direct sequel problem. Jaheira briefly explains to Nousagi how they know each other, then implores to be let out of her cage. Minsc just busted his ass out of his with his brute strength of crazy, so I call him over to try a similar tactic on Jaheira’s cage. No such luck. I need to find a key.

After some fucking around with the controls, I finally figure out that I can move my view around on the map by using the arrow keys. In a neighboring room, I see a bunch of weapons on a table, and I send my party over to gear up. The golem is standing by the table, which initially makes me nervous, but he makes no move to stop my intrepid adventurers, so I ignore him as I equip my people. Under the weapons, Nousagi finds a key! Maybe it will open Jaheira’s cage!

I discover I can select my entire party at once, and tell them all to move somewhere, so I send everyone back towards the cage. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from years of playing D&D, it’s never split the party. The key does indeed open the cage! Reuniting with Jaheira nets us another 3000 experience points. I call everyone back into the room with the golem to finish gearing up. A chest in the corner contains armor. I am pleasantly surprised to discover that everything I equip on my party members changes their appearance appropriately. I always appreciate some good dress up in my games.

I also discovered that Boo makes an adorable noise if you click on him, so I clicked on him for about a minute straight and giggled like an idiot the entire time.

After gearing up, I direct the party to continue through the door on the far side of the room. I expect the golem to attack them, but he just stands there stupidly. Maybe he needs his master to tell him what to do. No need to pick a fight with him, because in the hallway a Smoke Mephit attacks the party! I click him, and my party members make short work of him, automatically attacking the winged creature repeatedly until it is dead. 420 experience points are ours! I didn’t have to do very much in this first battle; I assume things will get more interesting as I level the party and they gain more exciting abilities.

We continue up the hallway, but the door at the end is locked. The mephit didn’t have a key, either. Hmm. The only other door I can find opens from the dungeon, and leads to a room containing a mysterious portal. The portal is also locked. Well, looks like it’s time to try murdering that golem and seeing if a key pops out of him like he’s some kind of evil clay pinata. I save first, though.

Attacking the golem…does nothing. He just stands there stupidly while my party’s weapons whiff by him ineffectually. Okay then. I must be missing something. Time to click on everything!

Oh wait, there’s a south door that I totally missed. Good job, me. The hallway here is littered with bodies. Some helpful narrative text informs me that these are the bodies of black-hooded thieves killed by magic. I send the party down the hallway, where we discover a room containing a glowing machine and a bunch of lightning mephits. There is a tense moment as the party is mobbed by continually spawning mephits, before I figure out that I can assign three party members to mephit murder and one party member to the task of turning off the mephit making machine. Victory is ours!

We continue onward into a large room full of enormous and baleful looking red crystals. A red guy with horns and a sword who is probably a demon introduces himself as Aataqah. His name makes me more certain that he’s probably a demon. He talks like he knows Nousagi, and then presents her with a slightly insane hypothetical situation: he invites her to imagine that she and a sibling were placed in adjacent cells in a dungeon. Each cell contains a magic button. If Nousagi presses her button, she dies, but her sibling goes free. If her sibling pushes the button, the sibling dies and Nousagi goes free. If they both push the buttons, they die. If one of them does not push a button after one hour, they both die. Nousagi says she would push her button, befitting her good alignment. Unsurprisingly, after she answers, the demon summons an ogre mage to attack the party!

Unfortunately, for all my determined clicking I am unable to get anyone to attack the mage, and it kills Nousagi in a few hits while I’m messing around with the controls. I am treated to an impressive CGI hand being disintegrated into bone, and then I’m kicked back to my last save, which is, of course, much farther back than I would have liked. I always forget to save often enough in games like this.

The second time through, I save right before the battle, and make quick work of that stupid ogre mage once I get my party to cooperate and actually attack the damn thing. My reward is some cryptic advice from the demon, who of course disappears. I suspect I will be seeing him as a boss fight eventually.

I save once more, then I discover that the little symbol that kind of looks like a millipede is in fact supposed to be an eyelid, and it lets my party take an extended rest, recovering hit points. This is the point that I checked the clock and realized that it was after 4am, and well past the time that I ought to be taking my own extended rest.

I really had fun with this game. The learning curve is clearly steep, especially as there is no tutorial to speak of, but I’m figuring things out. Next time I play this game, I’ll play it with my husband awake. He’s played this before, and I bet he can give me some pointers. I’d really like to keep playing this one. It seems like some good, dungeon-crawling fun. The graphics are a bit dated, I suppose, but still quite nice-looking. The voice acting is pretty good and the writing is excellent. I would like to read every hilarious thing that Minsc has to say.

Especially if it involves Boo.

UPDATE:

I broke down and bought Baldur’s Gate 1.

Facebook friends kept telling me that I really had to play the first game to know what was going on, and it was really good, and hey, it was ALSO on sale, so I bought it.

I’m kind of glad I did, because I then discovered that I had inadvertently chosen one of the worst classes in the game. THEN I discovered that if I played a True Neutral caster, I could use Find Familiar to SUMMON A BUNNY RABBIT.

So after a lot of false starts, I have finally ended up with a True Neutral elven Wild Made with a pet bunny.

TOTALLY WORTH IT.

RPG Rabbit Plays To The Moon

All right, guys. Stop reading this for a minute, and go to Steam. Search To The Moon, and buy that shit. Right now. It’s on sale until Wednesday for $2.99. That’s like a burger and fries. You can give up a burger and fries for this game. It’s totally, 100% worth it. Look, I’ll make it easy, here’s the link.

Okay, bought the game? Great. Now I will tell you why you should play it, and I won’t spoil anything, because the joy of this game is in the discovery.

To The Moon is an indie title, released by Freebird Games back in 2011. It received a lot of buzz when it first came out, both for its story and presentation. I downloaded the demo and really liked it, but I was also really broke, so even the $9.99 asking price seemed a little steep at the time. Goddess bless the Steam Holiday Sale, though! When I saw To The Moon for 70% off, I was all over that shit like a chocobo on some gysahl greens.

The game was developed using the RPG Maker engine, which gives it an absolutely charming SNES atmosphere. Even though the graphics are relatively simplistic for this day and age, they ooze with retro charm and are more than adequate to tell the really excellent story that is on display here.

Because that is absolutely what this game’s purpose is: to tell a story, a really moving, deep, and beautiful story about life and death and love and the nature of memory. There honestly isn’t a lot of what you would consider “gameplay.” You move around, you click on things, you read dialogue, and you solve simple tile puzzles.

That’s it. That is all there is to this game. But that’s all it needs, as it turns out.

The basic premise is that in the near future, a company called Sigmund Corp. has developed a way to change the memories of a person who is dying in order to fulfill their final wish. To that end, Dr. Eva Rosaline and Dr. Neil Watts are dispatched to the deathbed of Johnny Wyles. His wish? To go to the moon, although Johnny can’t explain why it’s so important that he get there.

What follows is a journey back in time through Johnny’s life. Each memory that Eva and Neil visit is connected to the next by a “memento,” an object that appears in both memories. So most of the gameplay part of the game consists of locating and activating each memento, then solving an easy tile-flipping puzzle so that you can proceed to the next memory. The puzzles have a par number of moves to finish in, but you receive no penalty for taking more moves to solve it. You’ll get good at them. I think I’m a little over halfway through the game, and I hit the par almost every time now.

So it’s a very easy game, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is finding out what is going on in the memories of Johnny Wyles, and figuring out what is up with his late wife, River. And you are not going to want to stop playing. You are going to want to know. Part of this is because it’s a really well-paced story. Every time you solve one mystery, you find that the solution only presents more mysteries to solve. The dialogue is also genuinely charming and funny, something that I really appreciated. RPG dialogue tends to be kind of stilted, and any humor is usually unintentional (spoony bard, anyone?). When RPG dialogue tries to be funny, it usually falls flat and comes out as the awkward, forced humor you find in some anime, you know the kind, where all the characters just start laughing at something that wasn’t really that funny, and then the camera pans away while the voice actors are trying to keep laughing in a way that doesn’t sound like they’re trying waaay too hard?

Well, that doesn’t happen in To The Moon. Dr. Neil Watts is actually hilarious.

And also apparently a huge nerd.

Not only is the dialogue funny and interesting, the story moving and fascinating, but the music is gorgeous. Kan Gao, the head developer and composer, plays a mean sad piano. The tunes are wistful and heartbreaking and will make you want to cry. All the time. I really regret not buying the soundtrack bundled with the game (only $3.74 during the Steam sale!), and I may go back and grab it before the sale ends. It’s like a dollar fifty on its own. That’s like some fries. I can sacrifice fries for beautiful music!

I haven’t finished the game yet, and it’s really gnawing at me, like when you’re stuck in a really good book, but you haven’t found the time to finish reading it yet, so whenever you’re not reading it, you’re thinking about it. The story is really that good. There’s a reason it won GameSpot’s Best Story award of 2011, beating out several much larger, higher-profile games. Story is the main reason I play games, and this one has the purest, most interesting story of any game I’ve played in a long, long time. Maybe ever.

GO. TO STEAM. NOW. I promise, this is the best $2.99 you will ever spend.

…oh yeah, and also?

BUNNIES EVERYWHERE!

The RPG rabbit approves!