How I learned to stop worrying and learned to give up on Undertale

Micro-review #1: UNDERTALE

c/o wikimedia commons

Boy, that's intimidating. I'm doing my first review on everyone's Game of the Year. I've tried several times to play this game, and quickly grew tired of the painful exposition, the limited and counter-intuitive methods of interaction, and the tedium of reading the same boss battle prequel doggerel before every attack. Then there was bullet hell. Then I was dead, back at a checkpoint.

Checkpoints are the death of fun; they represent the insistence that not only will you listen to this poorly-paced monologue several times to continue, you will do it each time from the beginning, with a bit of lollygagging around to set it up. This is not the experience of meaningful challenge (which is not to say it's not hard; it's quite challenging, and I am Bad At Bullet Hell). This is the experience of punishment, of being forced to to listen to a madman speak at length over and over while I fail, though failure adds nothing to the experience of the game but length. It is old-school punishing video game design, and I have no patience for old-school games. 

In the tabletop RPG world, there's a great concept of failing forward, pioneered (I believe) by Luke Crane of Burning Wheel HQ. The idea, in essence, is that a failure state ought to be as interesting as success; if you fail to sneak past a guard, your failure creates a new situation for the characters to tackle in different ways. The game gets more interesting even though your character failed.

This is what I'd like to see in video games. And while one fight in Undertale sort of delivers, it does a poor job of teaching the player when they are failing forward and when they are simply failing. 

Admittedly, this is a tall order in a small indie adventure game, but it's certainly been done. (I look at Invisible, Inc. as a great example of a small stealth game with fail-forward elements, where you need to adapt your plan, using different resources and areas of approach, when dealing with a compromised agent.)

Anyway, I'm willing to accept that this problem is mine, and mine alone. Plenty of people like old-school games, but I'm not one of them. So I put Undertale away.

And then several people who I generally respect in terms of narrative video games told me Undertale was a deep, thoughtful game. In fact, it was one of the best in years, and it does what so few games pull off: it overflows with interesting (if opaque) decisions and the Human Feeling of Joy.

I can always use more of the Human Feeling of Joy, so I jumped back in to Undertale, waiting for the Human Feeling to start. I am confident I did not experience Joy in my first three hours. I experienced some monsters with personalities, conveyed through three-line text boxes. I experienced a lot of walking around and hoping not to run into wandering monsters. I experienced some lovely music (Oooh! Strings!) and I definitely caught some Memes, which so many people seem to have confused with the Human Feeling of Joy, but I was confident that this was not what my friends and every major video game reviewer was pushing me toward. The Joy they were experiencing was the pure, uncut stuff. 

Then I got to a talking dummy. And a ten (or so) round evolving bullet hell game, which I tried to complete in earnest at least a dozen times. And then I got angry, and decided I don't care about the stupid Human Emotion of Joy enough to defeat this repetitive muttering dummy another time. I quit, because I was seeking Joy, and it wasn't there for me. 

I'm not going to say that Undertale is not a Joyful game. I would hazard a guess that its Joy is a very genre-conscious, trope-based Joy. There may or may not be a smattering of nostalgia. I suspect I cannot see it because I've never played Earthbound and I don't enjoy JRPGs. This is clearly a game made with love by for a loving audience.

But whatever Joy it has, it's the kind of Joy I've seen others experience playing fighting games, but have never felt myself. I've felt joy! I still remember finishing Gone Home and offering a blanket declaration that everyone, gamer or not, ought to play it. I could never imagine saying the same about Undertale in a non-gaming context. In fact, I doubt I'll ever talk about Undertale in a gaming context again, because I'd be a pariah. It will enter the "smile, don't talk, and hope this ends soon" discussion zone, where all anime conversations take place. 

I'm not broken. I just realized that I find my Joy in different things. And this, my coming out as a malcontent who couldn't find the Joy in the Game of the Year, is a reminder that I can stand apart and still within our hobby. I respect your joy, and I hope you're OK with me choosing to pursue mine. If not, this is a fine hill to die on. 

Tomorrow, I'll come back and talk about something that does indeed Induce Human Joy in my robot heart: Shenandoah Studios' Battle of the Bulge, on iOS, Steam, and maybe some lesser platforms.