After 7 years of being one of my favourite games, I think I finally found a thesis for my thoughts on Undertale. Since I don't really feel like writing a full essay or anything, and don't have much to say on level design or artwork or boss design, I'll summarise it here:

Undertale is an examination of LOVE - although on a broader scale, I think the game focuses on 'empathy' itself. Not just in terms of endearing players to its lovable characters, and asking them to forgive the unforgivable so that the world can move past vicious cycles; those themes are primarily relegated to the Pacifist, which I still adore for its passionate spirit, wonderful humour and touching story about "Determination". No, Undertale is fundamentally criticising the way its audience's empathy can become divorced from the way they play games. In most Neutral routes, the game calls uncomfortable attention to the accumulating impact of taking a life - producing unique interactions with Flowey, and culminating in the many variations of the player's call with Sans.

In the Genocide route, generally taken as the player's final route for completion sake, Toby Fox reveals his entire metatextual hand with a superb flourish. Encounters become a chore, the game's mechanics and characters resisting your impossible determination to butcher Toby's story, and in the final moments the player loses control of their character as they disregard, and murder, every element of the world. As the game repeats in the Genocide route (e.g. Snowman), everything has become useless to you. It's a haunting challenge to the idea of completionism, made even more potent by this route's recontextualisation of Flowey, the hateful villain of Undertale, as a literal mirror of what the player has become. Uncaring about the story, and devoid of 'empathy' or LOVE.

Finally, the anti-VN! Something that starts good, but gets much less interesting!

Don't get me wrong, Slay the Princess is really fun and snappy from moment-to-moment, and has a really great sense of both its characters' voices and artistic style. Furthermore, the game is super reactive to the player's choices, and even invents new characters on the spot to constitute the audience's swaying opinions on the plot, enhanced in enjoyable due to the clever, thoughtful prose given to these characters and the narrator - occasionally even matching my actual thoughts.

However, the ending stretch really muddles my feelings on the game (as it did for most people) - as it turns out, the metafictive format was actually intended as a commentary on the nature of death and rebirth in our universe, illustrating oppositional philosophical perspectives as deities and leaving the final judgement up to the audience (I think? It's a little unclear for me...). I personally thought this was really jarring for the story's actual content, which seemed to hint more towards a dissection of fictional constructs and their purposes for comforting or challenging us. In that sense, I found the Thorn to be a much more fulfilling ending, even if its story only focused on the relationship between two people stuck in an intrinsically mistrustful, yet potentially enthralling, relationship.

This might be an unfair/cliche comparison, but the ending struck me as a lesser replication of (THEMATIC SPOILERS FOR BEST GAME INCOMING!!) Outer Wild's ending; however, that game chose to centre itself around life and its potential for discovery/adventure, complimented with a time loop mechanic that pushes players to stubbornly oppose the universe's end. As such, the ending itself (which I won't spoil) becomes a rather beautiful and striking teaching moment, flowing perfectly from the game's tone and progression and leaving me with my favourite ending ever. By contrast, the misguided ambition of the far less textually-integrated message in Slay the Princess sort of fell apart; leaving me with a fun, yet almost insubstantial, experience.

As a side note: the game wasn't particularly scary (that may be intended, idk), but the sound design was good.

Outer Wilds is a game that teaches you, mostly without a single word. The game teaches you its world, it allows you to slowly discover its mechanics, and along the way it teaches you its philosophy; the ability to move on, and allow a new universe to flourish. The nature of a free, open-world game directly enhances this experience: everything you discover is by your own choice, and if you're stuck on a puzzle you can always find somewhere else to explore.

The DLC completely uphauls these notions, while still remaining faithful to the original game. The solar system is replaced with an expansive, near-overpowering ring world, where 'light' is completely recontextualised and a whole new set of settings, mechanics and characters (dead) are awaiting you. The journey you take is a little more linear than the previous one, and a fair bit scarier, yet the game design is still as tight and open as your engagement requires. It's a little harder to get through than the base game, both in difficulty and in patience, but it's well worth it to discover everything that Mobius Digital hid away.

Speaking of, this game might be one of the best utilisations of gameplay in teaching and communicating themes that I've ever seen. You, as the player and your real identity, are forced to plunge yourself into the darkness to discover the truth: to face horrors and hardships all in the name of truth. Your journey here directly parallels the owl people's exploration of the galaxy - however, they feared the truth upon discovering it, and hid the eye away from all travelers. In contrast, you choose to continue, challenging the very structures of the world and breaking through the fabric of the virtual illusion to free the Prisoner.

The final encounter is probably my favourite moment in the game. Yes, even up there with the normal ending. The prisoner despairs at his people's actions, fearing his search for the truth was destroyed. At this point, you have gone through countless worlds, exploring every facet of the galaxy, and have learned everything the game had to teach you. At that moment, you become the teacher: you step forward as an active character in the story, show the prisoner everything you've gone through, and tell them their efforts weren't useless after all. The Nomai found the eye, leading to your own discovery. With that, the prisoner cries out in a mixture of sorrow for his race and relief for the universe. And thus, both of your bodies now deceased in the real world, you depart from life itself (except you wake up afterwards, of course).

Echoes of the Eye may not be as expansive, or engaging, or as well-paced as the base game. But it is absolutely worthy of the "Outer Wilds" moniker in nearly every way.

I've been trying to think of something to say about this game for ages, but nothing's ever come to fruition.

That's because this game defies everything. It is simultaneously a fresh reinvention for open worlds in general, a surprisingly in-depth integration of scientific logic and reason, and one of the most well-developed worlds, atmospheres, and stories I've ever played. You can do anything you want to without limitation, save for a serious lack of information and skill that the game slowly guides you into learning by yourself, and that's absolutely superb. Aside from that, the visuals are a minimalist masterpiece in colour, creativity, and design, and the music is probably the best way you could integrate post-rock and folk into a game soundtrack. It's really hard to properly express how GOOD this game is.

However, the best compliment I can give this game is that it made an existentialist like me less scared about death.

You've probably played Outer Wilds already - at least, you should've, given the Spoiler Warning. So, all I'd personally suggest doing is playing it again with a controller, possibly on a good console if you haven't already, and buying the DLC. This game is phenomenal, you probably already know this, and thank you to all the Backloggd users that recommended me this game.