Recent reviews by Pluvius

Considering the fact that this game is entirely free and open-source, the amount of depth that it has is very impressive. It starts out as a typical hacking game with the twist that you're using actual JavaScript (or a slightly simplified version of it) to automate your hacking, but as the game progresses, you literally go down the rabbit hole while being given more and more options to accomplish your objectives and more challenges requiring you to make use of those options. Highly recommended for fans of hacking games or any other game that requires analysis and optimization of automated systems (e.g. Factorio).

Before I finally got around to playing Undertale a few weeks ago, I figured it was overrated--no game could possibly merit the hype that this one got. When I finished the True Pacifist run a few days later, I reckoned that I was right, but only in the sense that a game like Portal 2 or Fallout is overrated. Undertale is probably one of the best Eastern-style RPGs I've ever played--in terms of quality-per-hour, I'd have no problem putting it in the same ranks as Chrono Trigger, and it's a hell of a lot better than its primary inspiration, Earthbound.

If I were to name only one reason to play this game that doesn't even get into specifics of mechanics or plot, it would be the reason I nominated it for the 2017 "Choices Matter" Steam Award. In most games that have moral choices, the choices only affect relatively minor elements such as the types of powers you get and some ways in which other characters react to you. The best you can usually hope for is a different ending. But Undertale has the best linkage between morality and gameplay that I've seen since Ultima IV. For a lot of greybearded gamers out there, that sentence alone should be enough to get you intrigued. For the rest of you, what I mean to say is that playing Undertale as a good guy is almost a completely different experience from playing it as a bad guy, so much so that I think you have to play it as both to gain a true understanding of the game and the message that Toby Fox was trying to convey with it.

I'm not going to say any more than that not only because this is a particularly bad game to spoil, but because anything else is truly unnecessary. If the above sounds even remotely interesting to you, then I urge you to give Undertale a try.