A year after its release, I've finally finished playing through Undertale for the first time, and all I can say is that it was... underwhelming. It's not bad, in fact there are parts of it that are actually very smart, but I really feel like I had gotten a bad experience from it.

If you're going to play Undertale, the only way to play it is completely blind. If you've had an obsessive fan spouting off in your ear for the past 12 months like I have, then your experience is probably already colored, and you're not going to get very much out of it. In fact, every minute I played it, I had my little sister looking over my shoulder, telling me everything to do and every route to take and every person to talk to and every word to say. By the end, I felt more like I was forcing myself through it. It wasn't fun.

Undertale relies greatly on discovery. Without this, it's just a woefully shallow RPG with some funny dialogue. I'll give developer Toby Fox props for being a good writer, but the gameplay is far too dumbed down to interest even the most casual RPG player. You can equip a grand total of one weapon and one clothing item (neither of which show up on your character), and have a whopping one attack. The "combat" diversifies when you take the pacifist route, since then you need to read a monster's rather obvious personality to figure out how to appease it, but this too becomes dull once you run into the same monster more than once. It isn't fun to run through the same set of actions 12 times, it's just busywork.

But I guess you need to fill hallways somehow. Besides the frequent puzzles and abundant scripted events, Undertale is basically a whole lot of hallways with enemies in them. Very long hallways, some of which consist graphically of a single, solid color.

You will find a love for your enter key, since the game's 8-bit "art" style strictly forbade having voice acting, and each text box has to be manually closed in order to progress in the game's mostly passive conversations. Occasionally, it'll let you make a binary choice between two dialogue options, some of which have some rather interesting consequences; but other than that, the dialogue system is very passive. Characters talk to the player, not with the player. It's undeniably well-written at points, but not enough to carry the entire game.

Maybe there will be a day when people stop talking about this game, and new players can finally just hop in and enjoy it. Even then, I get the niggling sense that some of its meaning might be lost.

This is a minor spoiler, so stop reading if you haven't played it yet, but Undertale is something of a deconstruction of RPGs. In fact, during a certain piece of late game dialogue, it makes this abundantly clear and removes every last bit of subtlety from the equation. It's also really late to the party, since KOTOR 2 brought up all the same points that Undertale did and then some; but Undertale's treatment of these messages seems lost for another big reason. It's just not that much of an RPG. It's a puzzle-adventure game with a really, really, really thin coat of RPG paint.

The RPG audience most likely to appreciate the game's themes will be underwhelmed by the game's almost condescending simplicity, while new RPG players may feel right at home with the simple gameplay, but won't have the RPG experience to look back on when the themes become clear. It's like reading Watchmen if you know nothing about superheroes, or playing Spec Ops: The Line when you haven't played Call of Duty. You need to have experience with the original work in order to appreciate the deconstruction, except the core gameplay does not attract fans of the original work to begin with.

The morality is black and white enough to make Bioshock blush, though I definitely have to give the game some credit for turning being the good guy into a puzzle. You can't just select the good guy options and get good guy points like you can in most RPGs, you have to really make a commitment to not hurting anyone. This is a good idea, but it sucks that every good option always has a good consequence, and every bad action always has a bad consequence. Pacifism is always rewarded, violence is always punished. Again, these consequences are much farther reaching than in most games (owing to its very short length), but it all just seems so binary. What if that guy I spared turned out to be a serial killer? Maybe not every saved life is exactly for the best. These are some very basic morality questions, and Undertale doesn't really incorporate any of them.

Undertale is good. It's very ambitious in its structure (if nothing else). But there are key elements that the developer clearly dropped the ball on, even as deeply rooted as the game's target audience. There are certainly moments that are inspired, or dare I say, brilliant, but it's all so easily spoiled and rendered moot, especially in the present day when everyone and their mother is talking about it. Next to that other indie game that took the drooling masses of the internet by storm, I'd take Undertale in a heartbeat. But it still didn't set me on fire like everyone told me it would.