Undertale

Ooookaaay... I haven't finished Undertale, but so far it is probably the weirdest game I have ever played. It is an indie game, an RPG with graphics that look like it was made in 1990 and mostly drawn by someone who did the best they could with a mouse and a paint program from that period. Despite looking like crap, it can still be fun to play thanks to clever writing that makes the story funny and at times touching and sweet, and other times creepy on a level I never knew was possible. Its most distinguishing feature is that you can get through the game without actually killing anybody, and there are three different endings depending on whether you kill everyone, spare everyone, or take a middle path. The way it works is that when a battle starts, you can choose either to attack or act, the latter of which will still leave you open to an attack from the monster, but you actually get a chance to avoid damage in a minigame so if you play it right you can be friendly with the monsters and get to the end without killing them, although sometimes this is harder than it looks and you often get tempted to simply kill monsters instead of exercising patience in sparing them.

In the game you are a human who falls down a hole into the subterranean world of monsters that has been sealed off from humans because there was a war that was basically just racist and ended up cramming all the monsters in a cave. The monsters actually have rather human personalities when you get to know them and each one has some quirk you can take advantage of to have peaceful interactions and like humans, some of them are jerks and it really takes patience to end the battle without killing them(usually bosses), whereas others are pretty much pushovers, and a few really just take one simple action to back off. The first monster you meet is Flowey, who appears to be a cute sunflower and then shockingly turns out to be the most raving mad psycho in the whole world. Fortunately, Flowey is chased off by Toriel, a horned beast who looks like a bipedal cow in a house dress and acts like a sweet overprotective mother. She takes you home and bakes you a pie and everything seems fine until you try to leave, and then she fights you to keep you with her. The truly sad and disturbing part is that she has solid logic to prove it's out of love, Asgore wants your soul to break the boundary to the outside world and you will be sacrificed if you don't stay with her, she's seen it happen to others before you. She's so stubborn I killed her the first time because the directions were kind of tricky and she cried for me before she died, so I tried again and she lived, but Flowey was right there to taunt me by saying he knew what I did. It took me a second to realize the game how complicated the game code was that it was expected I'd cheat like this, but his evil grin still creeped me out like "How did he know I reset the game?" As you move forward you meet more weird characters most notably the skeleton brothers Sans and Papyrus. Sans likes you right away and his sense of humor makes him likable, but Papyrus is confused, he wants to fight you at first, but despite his words his clumsy actions lead you to be spared, and if you have mercy on him you become friends and then he decides to date you, as it is abundantly clear he is socially awkward to the point he doesn't actually understand the meaning of dating. Also there are a series of dogs that are ridiculously cute as much like real dogs, they act like fierce guards until you pet them and they become your friends. There are also some other really weird characters and the methods of not fighting get weirder and weirder, including Vegetoid who wants you to eat him, Woshu who just wants to wash you, the cute Tems who just want kitty kibble and one monster simply wants you to leave it alone. The sweetest one in my opinion is Gyftrot, a reindeer decorated like a Christmas tree who is cranky because of the weght stacked on his antlers an all you have to do is remove the clutter.

The simplest thing to do is just kill everybody but I've been told this leads to a miserable ending which involves the destruction of the universe. The pacifist run, which I'm attempting, is supposed to get the best ending, but it is very testing, and I'm tempted to do a run where I kill everyone except Toriel, Sans and the dogs. It seems to be popular at cons, so if you're one of those people looking for a truly original and unique gaming experience, this is it.