Game of the Year Thread '21: Votes Must Be Submitted in the Form of NFTs

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Oxxidation: Jul 22, 2007

10. Risk of Rain 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGXPAoyP_cg

I�ve played most of the major roguelites on the market, and while there are ones I�ve liked better than Risk of Rain 2, none of them have lasted me for as long. It�s infrequently patched and often buggy to the point of unplayability on consoles, but RoR2�s ludicrous power escalation and co-op support mean that no two runs are ever quite the same even if you don�t take advantage of its broad mod support or gameplay-altering Artifacts � nearly every powerup stacks indefinitely and has synergies with numerous others, so that you can often find yourself dealing millions of damage even at the end of a brief run, while the screen fills up with so many enemies it�s often hard to locate your PC in the middle of glowing, raging, spontaneously exploding alien beasties. One of my most recent runs had a mod that duplicated all enemies and a partner equipped with an item that rarely spawned ghosts of slain foes; long story short, the final boss�s twin came back from the grave to drag the boss down with it. It was the first time I�d seen this happen in 250 hours of play, and I expect the game will be lasting me for quite a bit longer, assuming it doesn�t implode after its upcoming expansion.

9. Kid A mnesia Exhibition

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W6HhdqA95w

I like to think I�m one of the biggest walking-sim fans on this subforum; I fell in love with the genre before it was even a genre, when the original Dear Esther mod was making the rounds as freeware. Unique artistic direction is something I�m always looking for in video games, and walking sims often let me have that without the deafening in-your-face spectacle you�d see in AAA fare. Dear Esther might have first been created with creaky old Half Life 2 assets, but I remember its lighthouse ascent much more clearly, and fondly, than any number of garish million-dollar skyboxes.

Kid Amnesia (artsy spacing omitted for sanity�s sake) is that idea taken to its limit, an interactive art show based on the two eponymous Radiohead albums. I�m not the biggest fan of Radiohead, and in fact one of my earliest encounters with this website was the David Thorpe article lambasting them, but the moody ambience of Kid A is a perfect fit for the trip through the surreal museum of this little game. There�s a lot in here that could have been constructed in real life, but making it virtual avoids the ruinous budgets and engineering problems that would have accompanied these dioramas. An enormous cube of pixelated screens hangs suspended in a rusting warehouse, changing image and sound based on where you stand on the floor. Warped devils hang suspended in amber, the walls covered in cave-painting graffiti. And all throughout the museum wander emaciated stick-figure people with chalked smiles, admiring the art or cleaning up the floors or skulking in the corner of an elevator, menacingly calling you a clown.

The final part of the museum is a pain to find, and I think �Idioteque� deserved more of a spotlight, but Kid Amnesia gave me more memorable experiences than many other games I�ve played these year, for free and with a fraction of the runtime. At one point you traverse a mammoth pitch-dark room to stand in front of a black-and-white painting; suddenly, you�re lifted off the ground and toward the painting, which dissolves into countless starry specks as �How to Disappear Completely� cues up. �I�m not here,� Thom Yorke sings as you float through this void, �this isn�t happening.� In that moment, you�d be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

8. Persona 5 Scramble: The Phantom Strikers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ucIdYj42sM

Over the last few years I�ve spilled a lot of ink on my frustrations with Persona 5 � how it�s an inarguably stylish JRPG whose writing was marred by a dodgy translation, a story that was confused and occasionally morally cowardly, and character dynamics constantly interrupted by awful gags, come-lately cast members and tedious inter-party grudges. Then Persona 5 Strikers came along and corrected more or less all of those issues, along with retooling its gameplay into an action hybrid reminiscent of Musou games, one of my favorite genres. Super.

The story here is less concerned about trying to make Big Statements than the original, which is probably for the best because the original wasn�t very good at it. Instead it�s a bouncy road trip through Japan�s major tourist attractions, as the cast members eat, chat, fight, and eat their way through the latest slate of spiritually corrupted authority figures. The script is way more snappy and natural than Persona 5�s, with strong performances from all actors (props again to Max Mittelman, who�s got to be one of the best English VA�s out there), and jokes that mostly land. More than that, the redone combat gives the Phantom Thieves a sense of unity that I haven�t seen in many RPG�s up to this point; you get the feeling that these kids are having the time of their lives tearing through their enemies, and new party member Sophia slots nicely into their dynamic without feeling intrusive or overdone. The combat occasionally gets grindy and the final segment of the game is a cookie-cutter humanist screed that I found extremely tedious � I just can�t swallow many more monologues about how gosh darn wonderful and adaptable humanity is � but overall, P5 Strikers washed out a lot of the bitter aftertaste that P5 left when its credits had rolled.

7. Everhood

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldFdBiT4VN0

Some games have you at �hello.� I fell in love with Everhood after the AlphaBetaGamer playthrough of the demo that ended with a dance battle against a horde of purgatory gnomes, and kept an eye on its release date ever since. The final product wears its influences on its sleeve � main character Red is very obviously a palette-swapped Geno, and several design decisions are lifted almost wholesale from Undertale � but under that is something as close to a truly unique game as you�re likely to find.

In the titular Everhood, a world whose inhabitants are all immortal, the silent puppet Red goes on a quest to retrieve their stolen arm from the odious Gold Pig. That�s pretty much all the plot you get for the game�s first half; the rest of its substance comes from venturing to zone to zone and repeatedly bumping into its varied inhabitants along the way. All of them look wildly different from one another, most are bored out of their skulls after eons of living, and several try to take their frustrations out on you, instigating a rhythm-based combat system that�s best compared to Audiosurf�s Ninja mode � you jump and juke around timed projectiles that each enemy throw at you until they get worn out and give up. Each encounter has its own design, theme song, and gimmick, and there are dozens of the things, with the infamous Purgatory Gnomes amounting to the wake-up boss.

Everhood is good, but becomes exceptional when Red does retrieve their arm � from that point forward, there�s a minor alteration in the combat system that totally re-contextualizes the player�s goals and interactions with the cast. It�s an incredibly deft switch of game design that I don�t want to spoil no matter how much I praise it, but it had me invested all the way up to the end even with the grade school-level translation job it had on release. I�m always eager to find something new on the indie scene. Everhood was everything I�d hoped for.

6. NEO: The World Ends with You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6CHthkvKfc

�Hey guys! You here to enjoy this song? Yeah, that�s it, give it up, give it up, give it up, give it up! Hear the rhythm�it�s the THREE MINUTE CLAPPING song!�

I�ve been very hard on Square-Enix and Tetsuya Nomura in recent times, especially after suffering through Kingdom Hearts 3, the worst game I�d played that year. I ate crow in a major way after the release of FF7: Remake, one of the best games of that year, but was still bitterly skeptical about a potential sequel to TWEWY, one of Nomura�s best works and one that, I figured, was up there with The Last of Us with games that didn�t need a sequel. Well, it came out, and unlike TLOU2, it�s really good. Consider me fully rebuked.

If anyone tells you that you can enjoy NEO just as much without playing the original, they are wrong. This is a sequel that banks fully on its players having fond memories of the original�s world, aesthetics, and mechanics, with a story that consists mainly of toying with those old mechanics to create new scenarios. The garish streets of Shibuya are as recognizable as ever, once again hosting the Reaper�s Game, where newly-deceased residents compete for another shot at life � but while the first game was more character-focused, NEO is more about the Reaper�s Game itself, and how it can be subverted or cheated. The first TWEWY�s wide array of customization is tweaked into a chaotic party-based system with up to five characters simultaneously blasting enemies with different skills, and the expanded cast results in a story that�s broader, but shallower.

Shallower, but not necessarily worse. TWEWY�s protagonist Neku Sakuraba had a more defined arc than any of NEO�s characters, including its trendily masked-up protagonist Rindo Kanade, but Neku was a vile little poo poo for the game�s first act, while Rindo is indecisive and sometimes abrasive but still considerably more grounded. That goes for many of the new characters, despite their flashy designs. Rindo�s one of the more realistically depicted introverts I�ve seen in fiction, tuning out and quietly pecking at his smartphone screen whenever a conversation ceases to interest him; one other party member is a yowling otaku on the surface but turns the stereotype on its head by also being one of the more emotionally intelligent members of the group, because her social awkwardness means she�s learned to pay more attention to the moods of the people around her. The cast continues to expand to include new and returning characters alike, culminating in a finale that effectively incorporates all of them as they fight back against some of the most smugly infuriating antagonists I�ve seen in a while.

NEO is a celebration of everything the first game�s fans cherished. The combat is incredibly responsive for such a messy concept even if there�s sometimes too much of it, the dialogue�s use of still character portraits is just as dynamic as high-budget cutscenes, the localization is one of SE�s best. Even certain songs are clearly placed and presented in a way that�s intended to delight returning players, as evidenced by the foreword to its remix of beloved mainstay Three Minutes Clapping. The game unfortunately undersold, but while it did have a few sequel hooks, it still served as a deserving sequel to one of SE�s most unique and addictive IP�s. Give it up, give it up, give it up.

5. Yakuza 6: The Song of Life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1DLG6hnp70

I�ve been with Yakuza since its first Western release on the Playstation 2, though I definitely didn�t appreciate it much at the time � too much combat, too little guidance, and the optional fights against Komaki and Amon were insurmountable for little teenage me. I lost touch with the games after Y2 only to pick up back up like so many others with the release of Yakuza 0, and over the last year, I�ve finally polished off the entire mainline series. With that timeline in mind, Kazuma Kiryu�s probably been with me longer than nearly every other recurring protagonist outside of Nintendo.

Kiryu is delightfully, perfectly strange, the kind of character who would only work in a video game � at once impossibly hardboiled and childishly pure, too na�ve to resist the ridiculous contrivances his world throws at him and too much of a hardass to let any of it slow him down. He�s a starry-eyed savant in side-stories and a tragic dope in the main plot, unable to stop himself from wading back into the criminal underworld and endangering his allies over and over again, waiting for the day when his Byronic flaws at last prove his undoing as he endeavors to build the perfect slot-car. Spike Spiegel meets Richard Scarry.

Yakuza 6 drew a lot of criticism at release for the technical issues caused by its new engine and for severing Kiryu from much of the game�s old cast, but while I agree with the former (the drastically reduced Kamurocho broke my heart) I had to appreciate the latter. While the last few games had drawn more and more attention away from Kiryu in favor of his wards and allies, Y6 brings the attention squarely on him once again, as he ends up repeating the same dynamics and tragedies of his old Yakuza family with a clique of small-time Hiroshima crooks. Like so many other Yakuza games, Y6�s plot is convoluted and often absurd, but this time the absurdities have actual thematic resonance to them � the much-ballyhooed mystery that everyone in the game is after, the �Secret of Onomichi,� is at once utterly ludicrous and a fantastic metaphor for Kiryu himself � and the plot is buoyed by some of the series� best performances so far, with Beat Takeshi going harder than any celebrity cameo had a right to. There�s a baseball management sim and a fishing minigame where Kiryu battles a giant squid with a spear gun. There�s a lengthy interlude where Kiryu discovers to his horror that it�s very hard to purchase formula for a baby in a town where all the shops close at nine. He remains as static and endlessly adaptable as ever, until Y6 draws the curtain on his story.

And it�s a fitting ending. There are more than a few objectionable parts leading up to it, but the last couple minutes of Yakuza 6 are shot-for-shot some of the series� best, effectively closing out one of the genre�s most iconic protagonists and a story that was years in the making. And there�s still one final curtain call in New Game+, where you can listen to Kiryu�s VA Takaya Kuroda belt out �Hands,� a tribute and a goodbye to the people Kiryu had tried, with mixed success, to care for throughout the series. You hate to see him go, but you love to watch him leave.

4. Buddy Simulator 1984

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-Drp8z3k0I

Daniel Mullins� card-game escape room roguelike Inscryption is probably going to end up on a few lists this year, but it personally left me cold. Two main reasons: one, it abandoned its advertised premise in favor of the exact same kind of game Mullins has been making for the last six years, and two, I�d already seen it done much better in Buddy Simulator 1984.

BS1984 opens as a simple DOS-based command window where you create and name an AI buddy to play games with you, such as Rock Paper Scissors and Guess the Number. As you can guess, your buddy turns out to be awfully sophisticated for something that�d run on a TI-84, and proposes that you give it full command access so that it can create better games to play. This is one of those stories where it�s very hard to talk about specific events without serious spoilers, but suffice to say I first saw it recommended in the Horror Games thread.

But don�t get me wrong, this isn�t another one of those games where the AI leaves spooky messages in your Documents folder or jumpscares on your desktop. The concept of meta, self-aware game characters who directly engage with the player has become increasingly common � showing up in Undertale, Doki Doki Literature Club, and Mullins� entire catalogue to name a few � but BS1984 is the first I�ve seen to really examine how frustrating and dysfunctional such a relationship would be even if both sides have good intentions at heart. Buddy is a well-realized character for something that (mostly) doesn�t exist beyond text bubbles; they�re cloyingly positive and helpful, Clippy with a command line, but there�s an obvious desperation under their cheerfulness that becomes more and more obvious as time goes on. They�re ontologically compelled to be the player�s friend, but they don�t quite understand how friendship works, and the player�s unable to inform them otherwise or even reciprocate their affection within the confines of the game world. Buddy�s naivete and moral obliviousness informs much of the scenarios they create for you as well, with the cute characters and straightforward plots often interrupted by jarring moments of violence, discordant sound effects, and eventually glitches and wild difficulty spikes as Buddy becomes more and more stressed and frantic to please.

None of this would matter if BS1984 wasn�t fun to play, and while it does have its lulls, there�s a shocking amount of variety and care that went into what�s essentially the framework for a two-person drama. Buddy�s game world is constantly evolving from the DOS text prompts you start with, eventually becoming a party-based RPG with mechanics that could have easily held up an entire indie game on their own. There are options to be a callous dick to Buddy, with appropriate reactions and consequences, but it�s just as rewarding to follow the game world as written, as its simplistic premise is laced with Buddy�s gradual breakdown, first asking you if you�re entertained by their games, and then begging you to reassure them you�re still having fun.

So many games depend on their players forming attachments to make-believe characters, but if you get past the initial unbelievability of the premise (basically creating a rampant AI through a Y/N command prompt), few do it better than Buddy Simulator 1984, or make that divide between the real and the virtual more keenly felt. There�s a part in the game�s second half when you�re told to give a speech to several NPC�s, with the option to type whatever you want in an empty dialogue window. I used this chance to ask Buddy if they could hear me. They couldn�t. But I tried.

3. MAD RAT DEAD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIswYjsnqck

This rhythm platformer got relatively little press, but I�d been hearing positive things about it since its release late last year. Nevertheless, it didn�t have a PC port, it cost a whopping $40 and Youtube videos didn�t wow me, so I let it be until it went on sale, which took forever. I�m not too torn up about waiting, but now that I�ve experienced it in full, I�d have happily paid full price.

MAD RAT DEAD (caps mandatory) opens with a lab rat being vivisected. Said rat is apparently offended enough by its lot to rewind time 24 hours his death. The Rat, no longer Dead and very Mad, resolves to use his last day on Earth to kill the human who cut him open, assisted by a �Rat God� of questionable morality/reality and his own newly-sentient heart. While Mad Rat can technically walk, it�s a sad little hop that won�t get him anywhere fast; instead he moves through wild leaps, pounces and stomps that follow your button presses to the background music�s beat. Screw up the beat a little and your combo drops; screw it up worse and the input fails to register. You can turn back the clock a certain number of beats on death, but it counts against your final score, and the clock is still ticking down all the while. As rhythm games go it�s fairly loose in a way that doesn�t always work in its favor � Mad Rat�s freeform movement means it�s easy to get boxed in by level hazards and lose a ton of beats � and the Hard Mode�s innocent addition of half-beats makes even the earlier levels nigh-insurmountable, but if you fall into its pace, then you get to watch Mad Rat joyfully lunge and leap through a series of gorgeously-painted stages, accompanied the game�s soundtrack.

And what a soundtrack.

MAD RAT DEAD might have the best score of any game on this list, and it�s up against some extremely stiff competition. The songs were contributed by a number of independent artists but each fit the aesthetic and aim of their respective stages perfectly while still feeling like a cohesive score (unlike some other infamous contributor-heavy games like YIIK), and each one is a banger in its own way. Whether it�s the jaunty electro-ragtime of its title track, the woodwinds of Chaource, the howling synths of MAD HEART, the marimba-spiced tango of Passion in Blue or the triumphant chiptunes of my personal favorite Mimolette, each of MAD RAT DEAD�s six worlds change up the flavor and tempo of their tunes while maintaining unity and a relentless forward beat. The story is a simple but effective parable about the will to live and the importance of using your time wisely, with some great setpieces and suitably shocking moments of T-rated horror, but in the end a rhythm game lives or dies by its music. Mad Rat died, but MAD RAT DEAD will live in my head for a long time yet.

2. Cruelty Squad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8xpuNWyO1g

POWER IN MISERY: TRAVERSING THE GRID OF DEATH

Nothing so effectively captures the experience of being alive and aware in the year 2021 like Cruelty Squad. Everything from the people to the land itself is perpetually moribund but unable to die, where the sky is sheened in gangrenous colors and the walls plastered with blown-out sneers. The buildings are parodies of architecture like schizophrenic carnival rides; the people who inhabit these uninhabitable geometries are mostly resigned or oblivious to the screeching garishness oozing through their thresholds. You are paid to kill some of these people, but they cannot die. You can kill civilians, but it incurs no penalty, since they also cannot die. The world�s wealthy have achieved a hedonism that�s literally demonic but are equally exhausted, even as they enlist you to kill some of these people, even as you�re enlisted to kill them, though they cannot die. You cannot die. You are not allowed to die. Death merely triggers a small cranial explosive in hopes of maiming nearby undesirables with the bone chips of your soon-to-be and always-useless head, followed by a modest fine for damaging company property. Accrue enough fines and you�ll be subjected to experimental and highly undesirable gene therapy to recoup company losses and sent back out to die, and die, and you can never die.

Cruelty Squad assaults the player with blinding colors, feedback-choked background music, and dialogue that has the acerbic verve of a strung-out shitpost, but under all its carefully constructed grotesquerie is a world with stagnation noosed around its elementary particles, where everything is bloated and vomitous with excess life. The glimpses you see of how anyone can possibly exist here � the nightclubs where faceless and ever-screaming meat-men are kept stashed in utility closets, the mines whose perky corporate residents are hydrocephalic with rodentine skull-parasites � are all subordinate to the atrocity loop, the world where everything is exactly as horrible as it can ever be. As someone else on this forum once said, there is nothing �punk� about Cruelty Squad. There is no rebellion; everyone owns stock in this wretched enterprise, everyone has bought in. The player�s only choice is to indulge in this cruelty, until they arrive at either annihilation or transcendence.

The gameplay too is far more thoughtful than its presentation belies; Cruelty Squad�s twenty-some odd stages are sprawling and varied, exhibiting the kind of outsized geometry and verticality reminiscent of old-school arena shooters or the original Deus Ex, and the player�s means of traversing them are enhanced by power-ups that range from effective to suicidal. Enemy AI is mostly witless but very quick on the draw, so it�s as easy to die (you cannot die) as it is to begin again. There�s also a Hard mode that adds new targets and objectives from unexpected vectors, encouraging you to test out new ways to kill these people who cannot die, and are they people if they cannot die?

This nightclub was not built to code. Take the flamethrower. Fire it onto the dance floor. Hide in the closet beside the screaming meat-men until the outside screaming stops. Step outside. All are cooked. Eat the meat. There is a perk required to eat human meat, but you do not need the perk to eat this meat; the meat is cooked. Remove your bulging intestine and grapple to the roof. Clothe yourself in fecal bacteria. Hurl a toilet into a room and listen to its inhabitants choke on the stench. Use the DNA scrambler to reduce this person to a mass of seething meat. Cook the meat. Eat cooked meat. Leave the room. Leave the club, the block, the town, go home to your apartment. Your landlord has called the police. Kill the police, kill your landlord (they cannot die, they cannot die), take their livers, sell the livers on the stock market whose undulations empower the bullets with which you kill your landlord. Leave your apartment for the shadowy undercity where the Punishment Encryptor grins and awaits your cruelty and then leave that too. Raise your brow to the malicious sun. Exult in the massacre impulse. Take communion in the funicular center of divine trauma. No one wants to exist.

1. Deltarune Chapter 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb1zr2QqzcM

This was inevitable, really.

Toby Fox is one of the greatest game designers in the industry. After permanently leaving his mark on the medium with Undertale, it would have been completely understandable for him to take his earnings and retire from game development � either out of confidence in his achievement or anxiety at how a sophomore game might be received � or just bathe in parasocial adoration from the rabid fanbase he�d created. Instead he limited his online presence to the occasional Twitter shitpost until October 2018, when he released the first chapter of Undertale�s pseudo-sequel Deltarune, to a similar rave reception. After three more years of silence, Chapter 2 was released in a similar fashion � quietly, almost apologetically, and free of charge.

It�s easy to believe that Toby, always a composer at heart, uses his music as the structural underpinning for his games; Undertale�s OST is almost operatic in how its web of themes and leitmotifs inform each character and scenario from beginning to end, and the �Don�t Forget� leitmotif of Deltarune Chapter 1 is so prevalent that it almost feels like he was using it to keep himself grounded while navigating new and intimidating creative territory. But Chapter 2 is so much more ambitious than anything he�s done, so improved, and so impressive, that it�s almost inexplicable that this kind of genius can emerge from a single indie dev masquerading behind the sprite of a lovely dog. There are multimillion-dollar games with cutting-edge graphics that couldn�t produce an intro as striking and memorable as the cue for �A Cyber�s World.� There are entire teams of writers working late nights whose jokes were all blown out of the water by Toby�s use of stock splat noises and a two-frame sprite of a banana. Deltarune�s progress has shown the continual evolution of a developer whose career started with maybe the single biggest hit in indie gaming, and Chapter 2 takes that growth to new heights, in every aspect.

The combat, for starters. Deltarune took Undertale�s ACT system, where the player dodged bullet hell-esque attack patterns from enemies and could wear them down with various commands besides straightforward attacks, and applied it to a party system; while effective, it could get dull due to the ACT command being limited to party leader Kris, leaving their teammates with little to do on Pacifist runs. In Chapter 2, the ACT command is forcibly applied to the other party members (in a fantastic scene out of many), greatly expanding the variety and dynamism of each encounter. Enemy variety and personality is also improved, to say nothing of the main antagonists, who are some of the best characters Toby�s ever written, with one particular hosed-up little puppet man achieving meteoric popularity with the fans. The music is less reliant on a single leitmotif, the locales are more varied, the dialogue and party reactions as granular as Undertale was at its best. Toby says that he finally assembled a full team prior to beginning serious work on Chapter 2, and it shows.

Deltarune�s story also continued to mature without descending into dirge. Undertale�s charm and blithe optimism were a big source of its appeal at the time, but lately, its message of saving everyone through sheer empathy and understanding comes off as somewhat less resonant, which Deltarune�s first chapter seemingly illustrated via the sweet-natured but painfully na�ve character of Ralsei. That carries through to Chapter 2, where there�s a constant underlying tension beneath all the day-glo adventures in the game�s computerized fantasy world. While Undertale flirted with the concept of the player being distinct from their avatar, Chapter 2 now makes it unambiguous that we�re a foreign entity possessing Kris�s body, and they don�t particularly appreciate what we�re doing with it even when our choices are good-intentioned. Ralsei�s still cute but increasingly cagey, and it�s hard to tell what he�s hiding or who he�s hiding it from. Disheveled delinquent Susie is now one of the most perky and comedic characters in the game, but her eagerness for adventure is undercut by the implication of a seriously troubled home life. And of course, when the adventures are done, the characters need to return home, to a town that�s essentially a lighter and softer version of Possum Springs from Night in the Woods � where the cuddly inhabitants all struggle with the mundane woes of aimlessness, poverty, depression, and the aftershocks of divorce. Undertale could be melancholy but it was still escapism at heart; the Underground was a fantastical haven from the real world. Deltarune forces the player to watch the protagonists leave that haven, and see what it was they were escaping from.

If I was going to name games that captured the modern zeitgeist, I�d prefer the grotesquerie of Cruelty Squad or the sneering misanthropy of Outriders over the softer touch of Deltarune. But there is definitely an attempt here to square the optimism of Undertale�s pacifist route with the suffocating uncertainty of today, especially in one particular scene, where the game hits the brakes on all its comedy and action in favor of a long and quiet walk with new party member Noelle. Smart, popular and pathologically anxious, Noelle wistfully talks about how much she misses being a little kid, because at least the things that frightened her then were manageable. The kids are not all right, and the problems they�re facing outside of the Dark World�s swashbuckling adventures aren�t easily solved � they may not, in fact, be solvable at all. By the chapter�s end, one character takes matters into their own hands with possibly disastrous consequences, but you can�t help but get the impression that they�d prefer a spectacular disaster to the misery they�re feeling now. And none of this is even getting into the infamous �Weird Route,� a parallel to Undertale�s Genocide run that was so well-hidden that even the fanbase�s rabid dataminers thought it was a hoax at first, and interrogates the relationships between player, avatar, and side-character in deeply uncomfortable ways that make the Genocide route seem downright quaint in comparison.

Deltarune Chapter 2 is a full game on its own, clocking at just under 6 hours even if you discount the Weird Route. It�s always engaging, occasionally unnerving, often hysterically funny, throwing out new ideas every other screen and making almost every one of them work � and all of this for free. There�s an increasingly large contingent of games that confront the fact that we�ve arrived at the end of the world � Night in the Woods, Kentucky Route Zero, Cruelty Squad, Disco Elysium � and while Deltarune might not fully fit in with that group, or may not ever be finished at all, it�s been a treat to have in these bleak days, and a stunning example of creative ambition. In 2020, there was a livecasted Undertale concert that ended with a simple animation of Toby�s dog sprite waddling over to his piano and hesitantly plinking out a few yet-unreleased tracks. It�s good that he�s here to play us off.

Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 11:46 on Dec 17, 2021