In the immediate aftermath of playing the game, and in light of my brief and traumatic experiments with a no-mercy-kill-everything playthrough, I was powerfully reminded both of my experience playing Hotline Miami for the first time and, more recently, playing The Beginner’s Guide. Ironically this means I’ll have dedicated even more writing to this aspect that I say the game isn’t really about. This might seem a bit hypocritical, so I’d like to expand a bit about why the discourse around a game that I say isn’t about violence tends to center so much around violence. Two weeks ago, discussing Undertale, I said the game wasn’t really about violence: At the same time, I dedicated the better part of a small essay on how its treatment of violence affected me. I also spoil Chrono Trigger: If you want to play Chrono Trigger you really should have gotten to it by now. I also get into kind of spoilery territory with The Beginner’s Guide, which I also think is very good and worth playing. If you’re still on the fence, perhaps you might want to check out Austin Walker’s excellent review of the game. If you haven’t played the game yet I’d strongly recommend doing so before reading, since I pretty much spoil the entire story, and also just generally recommend playing the game because it’s fantastic and also important. In this post I take a more in-depth look at the design of Undertale.
