Have you ever been too intimidated to play a video game? I think I’m mature enough to say that I have been on multiple occasions. Usually, it’s with a survival horror title. I’m a sucker for the stories of those games, but a massive coward when it comes to the actual scares. To give you an idea of how easily I frighten, I barely made it through Gone Home. I’m sure there are many great games and narratives I’ve missed over the years because the expectation of jump scares and pure dread intimidated me too much to actually give it a go.
Undertale was another title that intimidated me. Not because of its content, of course. I’ve known since before it released it was an RPG inspired by the likes of Earthbound and Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, which are both right up my alley. But every time I approached the possibility of popping the game into my Switch, I’d have people giving me a reason not to. Namely, the fanbase.
We are long past the point when Undertale was at the center of the gaming zeitgeist, but at the height of its popularity, some fans on the internet took their obsession with it way too far. A cursory Google search of “Undertale fans toxic” will bring up a wide variety of articles and videos on the problem. I was warned that I shouldn’t talk about the game on Twitter if I wasn’t doing a pacifist run, lest I invoke the wrath of strangers with an internet connection and way too much time on their hands.
In hindsight, I should have realized nobody gives a shit about my Twitter account and just done it anyway. But at the time, that was enough for me to never open my Switch copy. It’s sat on my shelf ever since, accumulating dust and hopefully, a respectable resell value on eBay. As the years passed and the frenzy over the game subsided, the itch to play it stayed with me. Seeing Sans appear in Smash Bros. only added to that desire, but it was after I went through Moon last year that I realized I'd waited long enough. I made a pact with myself to play the game within the year, and when it was added to Xbox Game Pass back in March, I knew the time had come.
