Holy shit, what an incredible experience. With just the right level of gameplay to compliment the writing, the only things I can think to compare this to are other dialogue-heavy adventure games like Night in the Woods or Oxenfree, but this is entirely different beast.

On the level of writing, subtext and dialogue this was made explicitly for me to love it, with a perfect mix of surface narrative and visceral metaphorical surrealism. It's a story of delivering antiques, but also of loss, working class struggle, modern pastoral industrialisation fears and how the world late stage capitalism creates forgets and leaves behind the people who build it, amongst so many other things.

On the front of art and music this game blows you away, gameplay perfectly joins with stunning visuals that perfectly mix with music into this fantastic stew of a game that's everything I love in film and literature, with a pure, concerntrated southern gothic aesthetic over so many visual styles and locations.
However, I do say 'film and literature' because normally I do ask for a little more game from a game, but that's likely just my being spoiled by my love for fast, deep action games, and anything more than what it's doing simply would not work here.

The story of Conway especially really drives home the commentary on corporate debt in the lower classes, losing his very body in surprisingly literal ways, and being so downtrodden he does nothing about it, it's subtly pulled off but still has the emotional impact you'd want.
Shannon's story displays how the harmful effects of this awful cycle can go down through generations, affecting them forever.

The end of the game shows us this rotten society, destroyed by forces beyond it's control, and something new, 5 Dogwood Drive, that just maybe we can make something better from. The Zero itself is a loop, metaphorically representing the awful cycle of capitalist and corporate greed, and the only way out is by literally escaping. Conway represents this old world perfectly, and the scene in the factory was gut-wrenching, what should be a personal hell for a recovering alcoholic who hates his delivery job (delivering whiskey) but he is numb to it, and he is swept up and lost. The rest of our characters, young and willing to find the new; especially Ezra, who also represents a connection with this strange new world and all of it's... strangeness, are the only ones who can forge a new way.

This game has the same subtextual depth I'm always looking for in literature and film, but it's so rare to see this level and this well executed a version of that in a video game, and I'm so glad we're moving into a world where that is becoming the norm. This was an astounding experience and one of the finest video games I've ever played, once again part of me wishes there was more game, but I can't dock points for my childish need to have action action action jump hit boom.

Whenever something is released that strikes such a massive emotional chord with hordes of people (especially kids,) judging whether its popularity is somehow “deserved” is mostly a waste of time.

The real money is in figuring out why it means so much to so many.

First, there is a good video game here. While the more Tumblrcore elements of the writing probably won’t age well and the 1-bit enemy battle graphics start to strain pretty early on, there is so much game and narrative design here that exudes a warm, gentle sophistication. And the skeleton (heh) key to it all is the jewel-box scale. A JRPG party of one enables a simple user interface that avoids even a whisper of an “Equipment” screen and a battle system that is methodically pushed to its absolute mechanical limits. A soundtrack made of nothing but variations and arrangements of 20-odd melodies would be insufferable in a longer game, but here, it’s a perfect storytelling tool. (Listen to how the Hotland, Core, and Mettaton EX themes rearrange the same melodic material to form a progression that gets both more menacing and more, um, gay.) The scale also enables a very well-managed plot/cinematic universe, complete with industrial-grade meta elements, that rarely threatens to fly off the rails even as it rolls through the traditional JRPG beats and beyond. In short, Undertale is An Actual JRPG, and probably the best since Chrono Trigger.

Culturally, this game probably marked the beginning of the end of Millennial dominance of Online. But I think it will be remembered as a good video game as much as a cultural artifact, and the two are connected. The game’s thesis statement is pretty simple: Video games (and perhaps, by extension, other things) should be considered as something more than buffets of content to consume and systems to manipulate and maximize. To people who were raised by a certain type of Boomer and/or absorbed certain types of cultural messages to approach the entire world as a mechanistic system rather than a messy collection of fellow, flawed humans, this game is an extremely powerful tonic. Forget the fanfic, the symphonic concerts, the musicals – that’s the actual glue holding the fandom together. There are people out there who earnestly say that this game made them feel seen, heard, and even loved for the first time. I don’t think they’re lying. I think this is what they mean: it showed them a way of approaching the world they had never imagined, never even been able to imagine. As a child of Boomers myself, I can sympathize.

And even if you’re not wild about the aesthetics or the fandom, the act of releasing a JRPG (let alone a good one) that can be fully experienced in about 15 mostly leisurely hours should earn Toby Fox a Nobel Prize.