Undertale is one of those games that is difficult to review because there isn't much that hasn't been already said about it. It's one of those games that seems to unite a lot of the different elements of gaming culture all into one. It has a lot of cozy cute stuff. It has a lot of strong emotional story beats. It has a lot of good jokes. It has a lot of challenge. It has a lot of niche content that implies that the creator was considering all these tiny edge cases that 99% of players wouldn't ever look for. Most of the people who I've encountered that didn't like it are people who were turned off by the more insane elements of the fan base before being able to play the game (which I would argue is more the fault of fan culture than the game.)

I recently finished my first playthough and decided to give it another go afterwards to experience some content I missed. While I think this game is good it is a marriage of two genres of game and I think it is a better example of one than the other. It is a bioware style party/character based rpg and it is a CRPG. I think it is one of the best Bioware style RPGs I have played, but it made a lot of weird decisions as a CRPG that annoyed me quite a bit. I tend to be more of a CRPG person (though I get that we are the much smaller demographic so focusing on the Bioware people makes sense) so these issues stood out to me as problems. Bad checkpointing, bad pathing, no option to pause the game, and no easy way to queue up actions all annoyed me and almost had me quit early on. I also think that the first act may have some pacing issues, maybe I was just drawn to the wrong order for quests, but there are some that seem somewhat urgent that you are super under leveled for at the beginning of the game.

Using poker as the mechanics of a game is one of those ideas that people come up with a lot. In my opinion this is the best execution of that idea. The promise of a poker based game is that poker has relatively simple mechanics that everyone knows so putting a twist on that will be easy for most people to figure out. In execution this has been difficult because it either ends up not being a meaningful enough escalation on poker or escalates in a way that removes the promised simplicity. Balatro is the first time that they hit that perfect sweet spot that maintains the simplicity and gives me a reason not to just play poker or a poker simulator.

This is one of those labor of love games like Dwarf Fortress that probably will continue slowly updating until the devs die (which will be a little harder in this case since this is less of a one man show.) It has a lot of potential to do a lot of really interesting and weird stuff. It's always hard to review these because in a year the game could be different in ways that would make it much better or much worse than it is now, but I have been playing it a bunch lately so this is as good a time as any to say that the experimental branch that I am playing is pretty good.

This is the kind of game that makes me interested in seeing what the dev does next. This did a good job creating atmosphere, the game made really good use of lighting and sound. The game play isn't bad, but I think the curve isn't great. I think ranged may be too op, the difficulty drops off pretty quick when you start getting good ranged weapons and a majority of enemies don't have much that can counter a ranged build. Final boss was pretty spongy. The atmosphere is there, if their next project has stronger game play I could see it being something great.

The gameplay was fine. The story had a quality that made always makes me wonder if the characters are OCs that have their own story. A lot of the characterization seems to jump around in a way that doesn't really give anyone a consistent arc.
I also hate that if you try to speed up the text speed it skips the dialogue. I get having an option to do that for speed running, but I would have appreciated a middle option where I didn't have to constantly alternate tapping right and space to make the text not be laboriously slow.