UnderTale: AND THIS IS ONLY THE DEMO!

Developer: Toby Fox

Publisher: Toby Fox

Format: PC

So one of the games that I've recently played has completely blown me away. That game is UnderTale. Not even the full game of UnderTale, just the demo! This is a game reminiscent of Earthbound in a few ways, but overall has provided one of the most unique experiences I have ever witnessed. I'm still astounded by nearly everything in this demo. The soul put into the music, art, gameplay, narrative, all of it!

The gameplay outside of combat is mostly puzzles amongst other things. The puzzles are really fun and well thought out. They always have a unique trick to them. These tricks can be rather easy to figure out yet still provide a good amount of challenge. It's not too hard to pick up on clues, as they're all over the place, yet these tricks are still impressive. It's got a good sense of balance between figuring out the puzzle and actually preforming the actions to solve the puzzle.

Now the combat is probably the mot unique thing about this whole demo. For once, you focus a lot more on how you're going to dodge instead of attack in a turn-based set-up. The attacking is very simple. You have one style of attack, which is represented by a little meter. A bar goes across the meter, and you try to stop it as close to the center as you can. The closer to the center you are, the more damage you do. The truly unique part is when the enemies attack you. When it's the enemy's turn to attack, a little heart that represents your soul appears in this little box. Your goal is to dodge whatever appears in that box. What happens in that box depends on the enemy you're fighting, so theres a lot of variety there. It's awesome to know that both sides of the fight is determined by skill and not stats, as an actual fight would be. There are also other options than fighting, like talking(although there's usually no reasoning with some creatures), fleeing, and even sparing monsters. Those options are open to you, if you want to use them.

The art style is a really well done 8-bit style, reminding me more of Earthbound. All the models look great, be it the enemies, the backgrounds, the puzzles you interact with, or even the character you play as. The character sprite is done in a way where it could look like either a boy or girl, effectively creating more with less. Now the music is grade A+. It's filled with so much soul with it's catchy and atmospherically impacting tunes. It's so good that I'm actually going to do an entire VGMC with just select tracks from this game's OST.

Now if there's anything that blew me away as I played it was the narrative. It's VERY well written. It's grade A++ at least. I really don't want to spoil anything here, as it could very well run the amazing experience this demo provides. Everything has it's own charm, it's own flavor to bring into the world, which is again, very well done. The one thing I will spoil is a joke made in the game. After a mini-boss fight with a ghost, he says this: You can't really kill me you know, with me being a ghost and all. I was just lowering my HP so I wouldn't be rude". Well I can honestly say that this is the first time I've seen someone go in that direction with the whole "you can't kill me, because I'm a ghost and therefore already dead" joke.

All in all, this is a PHENOMENAL demo for what is hopefully a phenomenal game. It had a kickstarter with a goal of 5,000 U.S. dollars, which was reached and then some. The total amount of funding it got from the crowd was around 51,000 U.S. dollars, which is awesome! This demo caught the attention of a lot of people, and for good reasons, as it deserves all the attention it could get on this planet. Great demo.

#undertale #demo #gamereview