Undertale is a deconstruction of RPGs, and video games in general. While, as in most, you are given the option to fight enemies, random encounters turn out to be NPCs in the overworld. If you avoid harming anyone, instead using the MERCY option, the game becomes a heartwarming and heartbreaking experience.
If, instead, you grind out the encounters, you will be treated as the genocidal scum you are.
I’ve done my best avoid spoilers here, as to be quite honest, this is an incredible experience to play through yourself. As far as the gameplay goes, it makes overtures at being an RPG—ATK, DEF, LV, EXP—but combat plays out like a bullet hell on the defense. Its music is amazing, too; the creator of the game was originally a composer before he branched out into programming, and it shows.
I truly can’t recommend this game enough. It was an incredibly inspiring experience to play, and I am far from the only one to feel that way. Without spoiling too much, the gameplay and story intertwine—and while it comes across hammy sometimes, that’s usually intentional—and moreover, it works.
It’s ten dollars on steam or the humble store, and even though a playthrough (of which, as I alluded to, there are multiple styles) will only last 6-12 hours, I’d pay ten times that.
For those not sure if they’re interested, there is a demo available at the Undertale website.
The soundtrack, too, is available (for the most part; a few spoilery end songs are omitted), at the bandcamp here.
Nice game. Its main contribution is the moral choice mechanic. I ended up using “mercy” all the time and got the best possible ending. The game’s creator Toby Fox is also a composer for Homestuck and the soundtrack has a very Homestucky feel. Also, some of the creature designs are pretty cute.
The bad: the story is paint by numbers, the writing is hammy, the characters are cardboard, and the art is average pixel art fare. The gameplay challenges are either boring puzzles or bullet hell, neither of which are very relevant to the story. There’s some humor but it didn’t make me laugh out loud. Everything works together just enough to make the moral choice seem important, but not more.
However, from a certain point of view these drawbacks don’t matter. My theory about art says that successful art needs to be new and enriching to viewers in at least some aspect, and repeating an existing idea doesn’t count as art anymore because you can’t enrich people in the same way twice. By that yardstick, Undertale succeeds as art where most other video games fail, even though they might be better in execution.
I came to the Media Thread specifically to recommend Undertale.
I worry some that casting it as “a game where you can be pacifist” spoils some of the experience. The game tree is apparently very dense, with many gradations of behavior, but the poles (of genocide and full pacifism) are obvious attractors. And I still enjoyed it immensely, only playing full pacifism, so maybe I shouldn’t worry that someone else is jumping straight to the good stuff instead of discovering that the good stuff exists after toying around with it.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown: 2012 turn-based tactical strategy (isometric 3D) game; on Steam for Linux. You kill aliens. Very heavy on the atmosphere and moody graphics, with many special effects and little cut-scenes. As a tactical strategy, it has weaknesses; units must be trained & upgraded over many missions so they are worth their weight in gold, one-shot kills are always possible, getting in the first shot is critical, and the level layout has the standard mechanism where clusters of aliens are triggered when one moves, all of which combine to force on you an extremely conservative gameplay style where you move as slowly as possible through the level with all your soldiers always in cover, lest you trigger 3 or 4 groups of aliens simultaneously and lose one or more near-irreplaceable units. As such, the snipers level up with the greatest of ease as they do most of the killing, and they only get more overpowered when Archangel armor is developed and they can now shoot across almost entire levels without having to move! The levels themselves are not very imaginative either, with all of them boiling down to search-and-destroy in levels which are copies of each other, even the hostage-rescue and bomb-defusing missions (where the best strategy seems to be to, yes, just killing the aliens as fast as possible). Tech upgrades are doled out sparingly, so that one only gets the funnest weapons like the Ghost armor (temporary invisibility) or Blaster Launcher (rockets that go around corners) as the game is ending. I have to contrast the tactical strategy aspect of XCOM unfavorably to the last game I was playing, Advance Wars: Dual Strike: units can be risked in gambits and attacks because losing them is not so devastating, the first-attacker still has a huge advantage but this makes for interesting ambushes and tactics rather than forcing passivity, and since the enemy is always in motion, you are constantly under pressure to act too. Overall, I enjoyed it, but don’t feel any need to play it again.
When it comes to turn-based tactical strategy, Massive Chalice is my favorite recent game specifically because the units age and die.
In XCOM, you choose one squad and ideally no one ever gets hurt, so you use them in every battle. But this means that you don’t get to see most of the options available to players; a team with two snipers and two assaults plays very differently from a balanced squad, for example, and if you go down one upgrade tree you don’t see the others.
In Massive Chalice, your team might be different every single battle (since a unit will typically see ~5 battles), and the classes available to you are determined by the marriages you make (three base classes with six hybrid classes from the combinations). If there isn’t a good hunter match for your hunter regent, then you might find yourself forced to try out the Trickshot. And since units will die eventually anyway, you find yourself actually willing to sacrifice units, instead of trying to go for the perfectionist route.
That sounds interesting, and I’m glad to see it supports Linux, but reading through the Metacritic reviews, I’m a little troubled that they tend to describe the tactical combat as being simpler than XCOM… which I already found pretty simplistic & unchallenging. Have you played both?
Yes—both original XCOM and new XCOM. Overall, I thought that Massive Chalice was very similar to new XCOM tactically, with a bit more focus on melee and less on ranged combat. It also has a bit worse graphics / aesthetics but a superior narrative. There was more variation and ‘freshness’ to the MC battles than to XCOM battles, but it’s rarely challenging in the same way that puzzle games can be challenging. The strategic map on Massive Chalice has more interesting choices, I think, and competes with tactical play in a more interesting way. I’ll try to elaborate on the salient bits of tactics.
All three games have the central narrative of “do things by the book or people die.” This is perhaps the most valuable life lesson one can get from these sorts of games, but it ‘forces passivity’ in a way that more forgiving tactics games don’t. (As mentioned earlier, in Massive Chalice people die even when you do things by the book, which allows for somewhat different choices and narratives.)
Both new XCOM and Massive Chalice have the “two actions per turn” system, with attacks ending the turn in the absence of a special ability. I believe Massive Chalice has more and more interesting ‘keep acting’ abilities, that allow you to do things like step out of cover, launch a shot, and then dash back into cover.
Massive Chalice has the same length of upgrade tree, with roughly the same number of choices, but more total upgrade trees because of having more classes.
Monsters in Massive Chalice seem more brutal (wait… that shot just ate XP? D:) but sometimes seem “easier to trick”—for example, one region is crossed by rivers, and it’s possible to murder any melee units trapped on the other side of the river from you. In XCOM only a handful of enemy units are melee, so that rarely comes up. Because there is overall less ranged combat and much less in the way of destructible terrain, the character of skirmishes are somewhat different; firefights are infrequent.
SOMA is a new horror videogame by the makers of Amnesia The Dark Descent.
The developers list Phillip K Dick, China Mieville, Permutation City, and the works of Peter Watts as primary influences.
Main character lives in Canada in 2015, goes in for a new experimental high-resolution brain-scan to aid treatment of his recent brain injury—and then all of a sudden he is sitting on a chair in some kind of post-apocalyptic undersea base full of malfunctioning robots (many of which seem to think they are human and many of which are insane) and biological humans heavily infected by technology that seems much more organic than the base itself but seem to not have much like their original minds left. I leave it to the reader to infer what happened to cause this sudden perspective shift.
Game plot comes down to a conflict between a powerful yet stupid AI trying to keep alive the last of humanity after a catastrophe beyond its control (but with a rather different definition of ‘humanity’ and ‘alive’) and robots running human brain emulations trying to carry out the last wishes of the last biological humans.
I actually havent played Amnesia myself, but I can say this combines elements from it and a more existential horror of what the copied humans have become and what can be done to them and what the… I’m gonna say humans ‘corrupted’ by the AI have become. There is definitely overlap in horror mechanics and tone with Amnesia at times with the corrupted humans but that is just one type of horror in the game.
Other Media Thread
Undertale is a deconstruction of RPGs, and video games in general. While, as in most, you are given the option to fight enemies, random encounters turn out to be NPCs in the overworld. If you avoid harming anyone, instead using the MERCY option, the game becomes a heartwarming and heartbreaking experience.
If, instead, you grind out the encounters, you will be treated as the genocidal scum you are.
I’ve done my best avoid spoilers here, as to be quite honest, this is an incredible experience to play through yourself. As far as the gameplay goes, it makes overtures at being an RPG—ATK, DEF, LV, EXP—but combat plays out like a bullet hell on the defense. Its music is amazing, too; the creator of the game was originally a composer before he branched out into programming, and it shows.
I truly can’t recommend this game enough. It was an incredibly inspiring experience to play, and I am far from the only one to feel that way. Without spoiling too much, the gameplay and story intertwine—and while it comes across hammy sometimes, that’s usually intentional—and moreover, it works.
It’s ten dollars on steam or the humble store, and even though a playthrough (of which, as I alluded to, there are multiple styles) will only last 6-12 hours, I’d pay ten times that.
For those not sure if they’re interested, there is a demo available at the Undertale website.
The soundtrack, too, is available (for the most part; a few spoilery end songs are omitted), at the bandcamp here.
Nice game. Its main contribution is the moral choice mechanic. I ended up using “mercy” all the time and got the best possible ending. The game’s creator Toby Fox is also a composer for Homestuck and the soundtrack has a very Homestucky feel. Also, some of the creature designs are pretty cute.
The bad: the story is paint by numbers, the writing is hammy, the characters are cardboard, and the art is average pixel art fare. The gameplay challenges are either boring puzzles or bullet hell, neither of which are very relevant to the story. There’s some humor but it didn’t make me laugh out loud. Everything works together just enough to make the moral choice seem important, but not more.
However, from a certain point of view these drawbacks don’t matter. My theory about art says that successful art needs to be new and enriching to viewers in at least some aspect, and repeating an existing idea doesn’t count as art anymore because you can’t enrich people in the same way twice. By that yardstick, Undertale succeeds as art where most other video games fail, even though they might be better in execution.
I came to the Media Thread specifically to recommend Undertale.
I worry some that casting it as “a game where you can be pacifist” spoils some of the experience. The game tree is apparently very dense, with many gradations of behavior, but the poles (of genocide and full pacifism) are obvious attractors. And I still enjoyed it immensely, only playing full pacifism, so maybe I shouldn’t worry that someone else is jumping straight to the good stuff instead of discovering that the good stuff exists after toying around with it.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown: 2012 turn-based tactical strategy (isometric 3D) game; on Steam for Linux. You kill aliens. Very heavy on the atmosphere and moody graphics, with many special effects and little cut-scenes. As a tactical strategy, it has weaknesses; units must be trained & upgraded over many missions so they are worth their weight in gold, one-shot kills are always possible, getting in the first shot is critical, and the level layout has the standard mechanism where clusters of aliens are triggered when one moves, all of which combine to force on you an extremely conservative gameplay style where you move as slowly as possible through the level with all your soldiers always in cover, lest you trigger 3 or 4 groups of aliens simultaneously and lose one or more near-irreplaceable units. As such, the snipers level up with the greatest of ease as they do most of the killing, and they only get more overpowered when Archangel armor is developed and they can now shoot across almost entire levels without having to move! The levels themselves are not very imaginative either, with all of them boiling down to search-and-destroy in levels which are copies of each other, even the hostage-rescue and bomb-defusing missions (where the best strategy seems to be to, yes, just killing the aliens as fast as possible). Tech upgrades are doled out sparingly, so that one only gets the funnest weapons like the Ghost armor (temporary invisibility) or Blaster Launcher (rockets that go around corners) as the game is ending. I have to contrast the tactical strategy aspect of XCOM unfavorably to the last game I was playing, Advance Wars: Dual Strike: units can be risked in gambits and attacks because losing them is not so devastating, the first-attacker still has a huge advantage but this makes for interesting ambushes and tactics rather than forcing passivity, and since the enemy is always in motion, you are constantly under pressure to act too. Overall, I enjoyed it, but don’t feel any need to play it again.
When it comes to turn-based tactical strategy, Massive Chalice is my favorite recent game specifically because the units age and die.
In XCOM, you choose one squad and ideally no one ever gets hurt, so you use them in every battle. But this means that you don’t get to see most of the options available to players; a team with two snipers and two assaults plays very differently from a balanced squad, for example, and if you go down one upgrade tree you don’t see the others.
In Massive Chalice, your team might be different every single battle (since a unit will typically see ~5 battles), and the classes available to you are determined by the marriages you make (three base classes with six hybrid classes from the combinations). If there isn’t a good hunter match for your hunter regent, then you might find yourself forced to try out the Trickshot. And since units will die eventually anyway, you find yourself actually willing to sacrifice units, instead of trying to go for the perfectionist route.
That sounds interesting, and I’m glad to see it supports Linux, but reading through the Metacritic reviews, I’m a little troubled that they tend to describe the tactical combat as being simpler than XCOM… which I already found pretty simplistic & unchallenging. Have you played both?
Yes—both original XCOM and new XCOM. Overall, I thought that Massive Chalice was very similar to new XCOM tactically, with a bit more focus on melee and less on ranged combat. It also has a bit worse graphics / aesthetics but a superior narrative. There was more variation and ‘freshness’ to the MC battles than to XCOM battles, but it’s rarely challenging in the same way that puzzle games can be challenging. The strategic map on Massive Chalice has more interesting choices, I think, and competes with tactical play in a more interesting way. I’ll try to elaborate on the salient bits of tactics.
All three games have the central narrative of “do things by the book or people die.” This is perhaps the most valuable life lesson one can get from these sorts of games, but it ‘forces passivity’ in a way that more forgiving tactics games don’t. (As mentioned earlier, in Massive Chalice people die even when you do things by the book, which allows for somewhat different choices and narratives.)
Both new XCOM and Massive Chalice have the “two actions per turn” system, with attacks ending the turn in the absence of a special ability. I believe Massive Chalice has more and more interesting ‘keep acting’ abilities, that allow you to do things like step out of cover, launch a shot, and then dash back into cover.
Massive Chalice has the same length of upgrade tree, with roughly the same number of choices, but more total upgrade trees because of having more classes.
Monsters in Massive Chalice seem more brutal (wait… that shot just ate XP? D:) but sometimes seem “easier to trick”—for example, one region is crossed by rivers, and it’s possible to murder any melee units trapped on the other side of the river from you. In XCOM only a handful of enemy units are melee, so that rarely comes up. Because there is overall less ranged combat and much less in the way of destructible terrain, the character of skirmishes are somewhat different; firefights are infrequent.
SOMA is a new horror videogame by the makers of Amnesia The Dark Descent.
The developers list Phillip K Dick, China Mieville, Permutation City, and the works of Peter Watts as primary influences.
Main character lives in Canada in 2015, goes in for a new experimental high-resolution brain-scan to aid treatment of his recent brain injury—and then all of a sudden he is sitting on a chair in some kind of post-apocalyptic undersea base full of malfunctioning robots (many of which seem to think they are human and many of which are insane) and biological humans heavily infected by technology that seems much more organic than the base itself but seem to not have much like their original minds left. I leave it to the reader to infer what happened to cause this sudden perspective shift.
Game plot comes down to a conflict between a powerful yet stupid AI trying to keep alive the last of humanity after a catastrophe beyond its control (but with a rather different definition of ‘humanity’ and ‘alive’) and robots running human brain emulations trying to carry out the last wishes of the last biological humans.
How severe would you rate the horror aspect as? This seems interesting, but I absolutely couldn’t handle Amnesia.
I actually havent played Amnesia myself, but I can say this combines elements from it and a more existential horror of what the copied humans have become and what can be done to them and what the… I’m gonna say humans ‘corrupted’ by the AI have become. There is definitely overlap in horror mechanics and tone with Amnesia at times with the corrupted humans but that is just one type of horror in the game.