I watch a friend talk about how the relationships between two characters are warm and loving and caring and full of little touches. They know those characters. They care about them. And then, when I play the experience of the game, when I walk through the spaces these characters live in, I don’t get that warmth or connection.
Instead, I have the experience of dealing with people who are distressed and upset and angry and socially awkward and childish and selfish and whatever I have to say isn’t important, because anyone who will accept them will do. There’s no character there. There’s just a generalised ball of selfish social anxiety.
When I play Undertale I am bored. I am exasperated. Every random encounter makes me sigh and wonder I hope this one is fast. The encounters that are obvious (‘be nice and avoid the bullets’) are breathtakingly wonderful because then I don’t have to endure much.
This game is a slog.
The game is a slog that explicitly tries to waste your time, and part of that point is because you’re meant to be enjoying the waste. You’re meant to be delighted at every time Papyrus interrupts your actions so he can spout memes at you. You’re meant to be enamoured of the awkward, post-teen re-teen worldview of the culture.
I deal with people who go back to their teenage behaviour all the time.
It’s not that fun when you actually have to deal with this from the outside.
God, this game makes me feel old and miserable. Like I’m yelling at kids on my damn lawn. Like dealing with other peoples’ breakups and collapses and emotional meltdowns is something that comes up as a text box where you don’t have to do anything until the little ‘yes or no’ box shows up. Just go about your life and let the people with problems just babble away at you. You don’t matter, after all. Their anxieties are just another delay that you have to endure and maybe laugh at and empathise with.
This is a game you’re meant to see a bit of yourself in.
I look in this game and see myself represented by a silent nobody who is judged and condemned and sneered at for acting in the name of frustration or violence.
Is that bad, though? I mean, there are lots of games for violent people. Or well, lots of games for what nonviolent people like to imagine violent people are like. There’s a lot of places you can slip into an unfeeling bullet-shitting ubermensch’s shoes and pretend that you’re that person for a bit, to enjoy the feeling of being empowered and dangerous. Undertale is of that small indie stable, the kind of games where hypothetically, you get the experience of being given the choice of nonspecific ‘fighting’ or being nice to random monsters and whatnot.
Undertale is a game for other people, so that’s okay.
It’s totally okay.
But what do you do when the conversation about a game is everywhere? What do you do when people want to know what you think? Why is this media sacrosanct to be criticised?
That’s… weird. It’s very weird for me. And it’s very alienating. I rarely ever get feedback on my writing – mostly, people don’t care what I have to say, but boy howdy did they want to disagree with me about not liking Undertale.
After giving up on Undertale for the first time, I went and played Shadows of Mordor. And Shadows of Mordor is sort of a simplistic game, a very elaborate set of parts around the simple task of just letting me stab a bunch of orcs. And I had fun doing that. I reflected, as I did it, on how funny it was that there was this narrative-driven retro game which had, thanks to minor, personal details, been perfectly unlike the things I wanted to play, while here there was a Lord of the Rings tie-in game that I was enjoying despite its stupid simplicity, AAA trappings and conventional praise, and the fact I actively dislike Lord of the Rings.
This upset people.
The upset was, despite explanations nothing at all to do with what I was feeling. It was about an attempt to argue Shadows of Mordor as being ‘bad’ and Undertale being ‘good’ and how I shouldn’t enjoy Shadows of Mordor.
Ironically, around that point I gave up on playing Shadows of Mordor. I mean, the people – plural! – who talked to me about this were right. It really is just a generic dumb murder box.
But wow… it was amazing to watch the Why doesn’t this game get a 10/10 mindset come up in the Indie Queer Fun Friendly Game Sphere.
… Oh, and one last subjective opinion for now? Undertale‘s like, really ugly? There are a few cute sprites and some lovely backgrounds. But the bulk of Undertale just plain out looks ugly to me. It’s been good at inspiring fanartists to make much better looking things, so that’s nice.