Fun and largely intuitive gameplay, and it can get pretty challenging (but if one fails a segment of a track a few times, the game will let one skip past that segment). This game sure has (super queer) vibes! It's extremely flashy, though. It was kinda hard for me to look at, and my partner couldn't tolerate looking at it for more than a couple of minutes. Sound sensitive and photosensitive players are likely to have a bad time here.
I would like to learn other players' interpretations of Little Death... I didn't really know what to make of that part.

I picked this up on the hope that the internet was exaggerating and that it was at least entertainingly bad. It is not, it just sucks. In three hours of "playing," I think I actually played for closer to an hour. The incredibly slow opening keeps taking away control for cutscenes and tutorials, and it's awful. Every time I thought I was going to get a chance to actually play and maybe even enjoy it, control was taken away again. Just genuinely awful. Cannot recommend this, even for the meme of it.

I have never seen another Undertale fanwork that so intimately understands what made the original work so well. This could easily have been a low-effort nostalgia-trip, but the sheer dedication to making this project a worthy successor to Undertale's cannot be overstated. Everything from the sprite quality to the music to the boss mechanics go so above and beyond what was required of them, to the point where I would almost believe this was a Toby Fox creation if I knew nothing about it beforehand.

Undertale Yellow spends a lot more time with its characters than the original, tending to have them stick around even after finishing their area rather than just disappearing into the background. You really are given so much more time to understand their personalities, and characters like Martlett and North Star are just as full of life and charm as any of the characters in the original game. This game is so overflowing with charm and personality that it barely even knows where to put it all.

The game also looks gorgeous, with more detailed backgrounds and far more sprite animation than the original had. Importantly, though, it doesn't look too good. A problem I have with a lot of undertale fanworks is that they don't understand that Undertale kind of needs to have a low-budget, homemade charm to it to maintain its atmosphere. All the dumb sprite inconsistencies in the original game are so near and dear to my heart, and Undertale Yellow captures that same aesthetic while still being noticeably easier on the eyes.

One thing I have to give this game immense credit for is using almost zero established characters or map layouts from Undertale. It would have been so easy for Clover to bump into the same cast of characters that Frisk ran into back in 2015, but the developer shows a shocking level of restraint in how they approach this established world. Focusing on new parts of the Underground makes it feel so much more like a real place, and the worldbuilding is such a natural extension of everything we already know about the place. While it does bear the Undertale name and world, it focuses so much of itself on new, original content, that it feels almost entirely new.

I don't want to get into heavy spoilers here, but I also appreciate that this game isn't going for the same sense of spectacle that the later encounters in Undertale do. It's a much more personal story, which makes sense considering breaking the Barrier is never in question at this point in time. While I do find the endings slightly less impactful because of this, they're aiming for such a different kind of emotional response that they mostly succeed in.

This review might be long and rambly, but I just finished the game and had so many thoughts I had to put down. I adore Undertale Yellow. It means so much to me that a group of fans were able to so distinctly understand what made Undertale great and use that to make something almost completely new within its world. I cannot recommend it more as both a companion piece to the original, and a fantastic indie RPG in its own right.

Real good! I definitely think this is a lesser thecatamites game which makes it sad that this is the only one most people know but still!

The main thing that stuck out to me about this is the soundtrack! I feel like most video games that use pre-existing music just stick to the most obvious choices, aka the same 5 80s pop songs, but Space Funeral is digital Crate digging. Just look at this list! Also I just think that committing copyright violations is a cool and fun thing to do. It feels like every indie dev wants to be a perfectly able-to-be-ported-to-consoles and limited run games-able object and I think that's lame! YouTube to mp3 your entire soundtrack!!!!! Bitch!!!!!!!!!!

Kinda heartbreaking because I think the story here was like two more draft cycles away from being an all-time great. The more complex theming here is obviously very welcome; I loved playing the first game but thought the story was pretty slight. As is though II's just not incisive enough for me, it feels too adrift in its abstract Star Wars-isms. I get what the theming is going for, but you can't just have good ideas. You have to dramatize them, make me feel them in the pit of my gut. You know, like Planescape: Torment (by the same writer) was extremely good at doing.

It doesn't help that it's such a fuckin' bummer. I love tons of games that end on sad notes, but I dunno y'all, I finished it on my birthday and I was just like "cool, great, why did I put forty hours into this." Again, it could've been chef's kiss perfect if it had really come together for me, but even with the patch I just don't think the story's all the way there.