Reviewing Undertale is difficult because pretty much everything there is to say about it has already been said. However, it is one of my favourite games of all time so I want to do it the honor of writing something about it.
I played Undertale for the first time in 2017, so I was too late for the game to be this brand new thing, but luckily I also missed out on the phase when the game was regarded as “cringe”. I also played it in time to already look back at it with some nostalgia when Deltarune chapter 1 came out. Overall, I think I played it at more or less the perfect time.
Undertale was the first 10/10 game I played. When I finished it, I became a bit sad that I would probably never play another game as good as this. And now, look at my games played. Multiple other 10/10s, and Undertale isn’t even my favourite game anymore. I’m glad to see how many great games I’ve played since then.
After finishing Undertale, I told all of my friends how much I love it. To this day, the only one of them to play it is my at-the-time girlfriend. And she didn’t even play it because of my recommendation, she saw it being played at GDQ, liked the music, and wanted to play it herself. We did end up playing it together for a date, and that was one of the best days of my high school life. Since finishing high school, I have made a lot of new friends, many of whom value my recommendations a lot more. There have been multiple occasions where friends got interested in playing a game simply because I recommended it to them, and that feels pretty great. And of course there’s also this website, where occasionally total strangers will say “I like this person’s opinion on this video game” and that also feels great.

Undertale is an amazing game. One of the best games I have ever played. But perhaps even more importantly, it’s an amazing milestone in my development with video games.

Teh bucket of d00m.

A little disappointed with Ultra Deluxe on the whole. I was The Stanley Parable's biggest fan in 2011 - for being a free mod it was surprisingly cogent as an exploration of the metatext in being a player character in a perceivably linear world. The remake was a nice thing too, brushing up the concepts the mod introduced with some greater production values and more keen attention to detail, rounding off the branching paths it also expanded upon. While I'm nowhere near blown away by its observations (especially now that it's 2022 and the subject matter is rather rote by now), nor does its all-too-smug humour really tickle me in any way... it's undeniably satisfying to play a game that knows what to say and when. All bases covered, all nooks and crannies accounted for, everything you can do and everywhere you go triggers an event flag somewhere in the backrooms for the narrator to guffaw about. There's a toy-like quality to it idk, I'm really just like Stanley hitting buttons and listening to their accompanying sound effects.

Ultra Deluxe is... a few more things, all pretty scant. This almost Invader Zim-grade object comedy fixation on a funny bucket item you carry into old ending routes to modify them in minor ways, and the majority of the dialogue is still "press button to make narrator change subject". No guides or whatever are available at the time of me saying all this, who knows, maybe I've neglected to walk down a specific sequence of doors and missed a new skill tree system. They shifted the engine from Source to Unity, I'm sure it's a console porting decision and it certainly all looks better, but no longer getting banished to The Serious Room for setting sv_cheats to 1 removes the best rugpull from the game!!!!

It's easy to look back at The Stanley Parable and laugh at it. It is, after all, a kind of self-important game that said things about video games that were getting pretty tired even in 2013. I loved the Stanley Parable when I first played the mod, loved it a little less when I played the steam release, and ultimately have found it less and less compelling as time goes on, as the times in which the jokes landed got more and more distant and the commentary got more and more trite.

One might reasonably ask why such an aging process has harmed Stanley when it hasn't harmed other games on quite the same level, and my argument for that would be that Stanley, to use a memetic phrase devoid of meaning, insists upon itself. There's little room for interpretation or multifaceted interpretation of it: Stanley Parable is a two-dimensional game, and what I mean by that is that it works on two dimensions: the jokes, and the commentary. There aren't really any other characters or themes or aesthetic twists and flourishes to appreciate: it's a game that is very blunt about what it's saying, and doesn't really have anything to it other than that. Which is fine! Really! But it kinda relies on the things it's saying being really good, and maybe they were, once on the facepunch forums or on ModDb. But now? Not so much.

Which is why the prospect of Ultra Deluxe intrigued me. It represented an opportunity to provide a new experience, to build on what came before, and make a case for Stanley Parable still being relevant, over a decade after the original mod came out. Perhaps I built some unrealistic expectations for it going in, as I did honestly think that a Rebuild of Stanley Parable was the right step to take for this, and I remember feeling similarly deflated by the steam release of Stanley hewing so close to the original mod, but regardless, The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe arrives with the enthusiastic impact of a wet fart in an empty room, not so much making a case for the relevance of the work in 2022 as making a supreme demonstration for it's growing irrelevance.

What we have here is an acceptable repackaging of the original game (with some pluses being options to sidestep some of the edgier stuff in the original release, namely the unbearably cringeworthy suicide sequence, and some minuses being the stripping out of jokes in the subtitles and the loss of the language of jokes that Source familiarity provided) alongside some, on the whole, pretty dire new content. Teeth-grindingly ancient observations on collectibles and DLC that would make CTRL+ALT+DEL groan paired with the Bucket. The fucking bucket. All the bucket stuff is absolutely unbearable humor that felt like being trapped in 2012-era reddit with people going on about narwhals and bacon. The superfluity of The Bucket Arc is clearly an argument about the futility of adding extra content in a re-release, but you still went and did it, and it was shit. It's satirical bent never rises above putting a dunce hat on itself and going "look at how dumb we're being". Ultra Deluxe has the same problem as Stanley Parable proper: it cannot help but slam you in the face with it's Point and it's Jokes, and when those land it works, but in Ultra Deluxe they almost never do, so you're just left trudging through a tediously unfunny experience reliving 2015 neoGAF in the most agonizing manner imaginable.

Ultra Deluxe is not without merit: there are truly talented artists and level designers at Crows Crows Crows, and they've crafted some really amazing spaces here. It's something they're really great at: their online multiplayer game/space TheClub.zone (which was shut down to give them time to develop this lol) is proof positive of that. But underneath the enormous weight of The Writing, they're never allowed to live, to breathe beyond the confines of The Writing's vehicle, and unfortunately, The Writing here is crap. It's as simple as that.

I wanted Ultra Deluxe to let me love Stanley Parable again. To prove once and for all that it has stood the test of time, that it does have a worthwhile place in video games and video game culture. But after seeing everything Ultra Deluxe has to offer, all I can do is sigh wearily, and type my review, which is as follows.

(ahem)

"Reddit Game."

I choose to believe that Swery's intentions were good with this game, and I'm glad it seems to have genuinely helped some people, but I'm so tired of trans stories being portrayed just through the struggles of dysphoria rather than through the growing confidence and happiness that transitioning can lead to, through the pain wrought upon trans people by society rather than through found family and the comfort of finding others who understand you. The overwhelmingly vast majority of the game's runtime is spent deep in a mire of sadness (that read to me as almost comically over-the-top edgy at its worst points), and for a story that claimed to be about regeneration I wish there was more joy to be found here.

It also honestly just feels egregious to me that the primary gameplay mechanic of a story about a trans woman revolves around solving puzzles by choosing to amputate, immolate or just generally tear your body to pieces. This is problematic both because of how eerily reminiscent it feels of various TERF talking points (how they refer to gender-affirming surgeries as "mutilation"), and also because I don't want to be forced to hear our trans protagonist's leg bones crunch apart for the fiftieth time in the game. Trans people shouldn't be forced through the level of extreme pain this game asks of its protagonist just to be allowed to opportunity to finally heal, grow and be happy.

This was actually my fourth soulslike game. I had already played Dark Souls 2 and 3 as well as Bloodborne and was honestly a bit hesitant to play it. It was much older than the other games and I heard bad things about the PC port. This was in 2017 and the remastered was still a few months away from being announced. I ended up playing it regardless.
And I loved it. There was so much unique about this game for me to love, like the world design or the music or the NPCs (this game probably has the least terrible side quests).
Sure, it has its issues, first and foremost Lost Izalith, Tomb of Giants, and Crystal Caves but I still ended up loving this game a lot.
This is the soulslike I replay most frequently, mostly because of how incredibly fun randomizer runs are. If you’ve never done a Dark Souls randomizer, I highly recommend doing one.

Dark Souls 3 is correct in that the inheritors of power and those who perpetuate such structures from the top are just a bunch of deranged, sick fucks that will ultimately bring about their own undoing if they don't take everyone one else out with them first. I think this game is saved by the DLC. I know that this game being so directly tied to DS1 is like the thematic point, but that concept just didn't grab me in the main game. The Dreg Heap in the Ringed City does far more to convey the reality of everything in dark souls land that can be burned being burned to sustain the first flame and the age of the gods than anything in the main game. Things like fighting the last demons alive, or Midir(though I think its an outrageous boss fight) and finding patches as the only other human to have made it to the end of the world are sick as hell. I popped off for a second painted world in a similar way to how I imagine a lot of people did for the stuff in the main game.

3.5 stars they did my girl Gwyndolin SO dirty

one of gaming's all-time great punchlines is how this is, to this day, one of the most technically fraught and unstable games ever made, chugging and stuttering on computers made nearly 20 years after it's release, where the game will, at every loading screen crash and then reload itself in the new area just to keep the memory leak from crashing your whole PC, and then you see the majesty, the sheer ambition of Downtown Seattle that this game struggles so hard to render...is like three rooms where if you look at a lightbulb the framerate is halved. genuine comedy gold.

only other real reason to play this is to witness how The Bush Years hit Deus Ex so hard. any semblance of rebellion or hope from the original's world has been stripped away completely, Alex D is a remorseless gun for hire without any of the charm of JC Denton, well-meaning terrorists like Tracer Tong from the original are suddenly apologetic state actors utterly condemnatory about their past dreams of a world free from the yoke of megacorps and fascism, and where any path not based in the perpetuity of the american empire will lead to the actual destruction of humanity. either With Us or Against Us indeed. the possibility for subversion, either narratively or experientially, is crushed underfoot by this contrition to the status quo and the obscenely narrow level design. as a game about Choice and Consequence and Freedom it's a disaster, but as a game about the lack of those things, about living in Francis Fukuyama's End of History? Invisible War can only be called a tremendous success.

don't know if i would call this a good game, exactly, but it is a deeply fascinating one. i think the ideology it espouses is truly evil but as a game design object I have to recognize the care and attention to which the game goes about communicating it. each deus ex game is a fascinating time capsule of the moment in which it was made, for good and ill, and this one is maybe the most unhinged and weird of them all. would love to give it a full proper replay to pick over it in greater detail but that would require it not crashing my computer every 25 minu-