If the phrase Final Fantasy VI opera scene doesn t mean anything to you, that s OK, I had to look it up on YouTube myself. Undertale s references go deep, but it s so much more than a JRPG tribute game. It s a tribute to fans, really—a celebration of our sincere love for game characters and stories, without cynicism or judgment (outside of a few inward-looking jabs, maybe). Either that, or it s a horror story. It depends.

Undertale can be a lot darker than it looks. You re a kid who s fallen into an underground realm of monsters who were banished from the surface and trapped there in a war the humans have long since moved on from. While you may want to help the monsters, it isn t always easy, because they keep trying to fight you. Encounter a hostile monster and they ll attack with bullet hell-style minigames, and on your turn, you can fight back—but you don t have to. You might compliment their good looks, or choose not to pick on them, or just show them mercy whether or not they want it. Undertale doesn t assume you re a killer, and battles can be resolved without attacking—it s like a whole game based on the final boss of Earthbound, as a friend put it. I sort of got the reference, and then looked it up to make sure I got it. It's apt!

Or you can just kill em all. But how could you? The monsters all have great personalities—a vegetable who just wants to feed you, a depressed ghost, a dog who does dog stuff, a bumbling skeleton who loves puzzles—and the story is one of the most heartfelt this year. When it ended (I mean, really ended), it was like watching the Portal credits for the first time. Undertale will go down as having one of the best video game endings of recent memory.

It s also a wonderfully inventive take on the RPG format, and an examination of games in general. Without spoiling too much, Undertale is always a step ahead of the player, predicting your next move and respecting the little decisions you make. Keep a disposable item for the whole game and use it at just the right time? It knows what s up. And it also knows when to withhold resolution—when you get to the end, you may not find what you were looking for. It can take two or three playthroughs to really be satisfied with Undertale, and that s how it s meant to be. I highly recommend avoiding guides unless you re really stuck, because it s far more fun to go in unaware, making friends and figuring it out along the way—that s really the point. Give it a chance to play with you, allowing its internal logic to stay hidden.

Undertale doesn t take long to get through. It s largely linear, though there s some backtracking, and takes about five hours on the first go—quicker in subsequent playthroughs. The introductory area is a bit of a chore, and some of the bullet hell battles are a real pain in the ass, but it s all worth the effort. The soundtrack is one of the best of the year, full of variety and emotion, and the graphics, while minimal, become comfortably charming over time (and get pretty flashy in certain instances).

Undertale is one of my favorite games of 2015 (maybe second to Rocket League), and I wholeheartedly recommend it. Getting the most out of it just takes a little determination.

Undertale shouldn t be spoiled in advance. You ve seen the score, you ve seen from the screenshots that it s a JRPG-style game, and I ll tell you up front, it s one of the funniest and best designed RPGs you re likely to play this year. Beyond that, I ll try to stay light on details—as much as I can while still telling you why it s great—but avoid Google, avoid forums, avoid picking away at the scab of not knowing much. The less you know about Undertale before diving in, the better it can work its magic.

The basic secret is that it s not entirely what it looks like: a goofy 8-bit RPG parody that owes a debt and at least two limbs to EarthBound/Mother. It s partly that, sure, and it s brilliant at it. After a slow and not particularly fun intro area, it opens up into a world more densely packed with jokes and puns and adorable characters than pretty much anything out there. Papyrus, the skeleton guard desperate for recognition and friends. His brother Sans, mocking RPG puzzles by just dumping a Junior Jumble to block your way. Crazy monsters like Woshua, who just wants you to be clean, and a ghost who only lowers his HP when you attack to be polite.

I haven t laughed this hard at a game in years, and if Undertale was purely a joke RPG like Cthulhu Saves The World or Barkley Shut Up And Jam: Gaiden, it d honestly be enough. Even its weaker moments where it veers too close to reference and inside joke oversaturation—the stuff of many a comedy RPG Maker game—just about work, if only because they re always over quickly.

But that s just what s happening on the surface, and it s disarming in just the right way. The cleverness builds as you play, and systems that originally seemed throw-away usually end up being more than they seem. The big gimmick is that nobody has to die: there are ways to spare everything and everybody, from the random monster encounters to the bosses. Combat plays out via a series of minigames, mostly unique to each monster, in which you move your pixel heart around in a small box—dodging bullets, blocking shots with shields, simple platforming, getting past shields, often layered to make things more complicated when you face off against multiple enemies at once.

As a really basic example of the mechanics being more than they seem, Undertale often uses them to convey the character s mental state: faster attacks when they re annoyed, bolder attacks when they re feeling confident, or even aiming to miss when they don t really want to fight. There s the vegetable who just wants you to eat your greens and will leave you alone if you do. A late game encounter with a character who gets a mid-battle telegram from a previous zone to tell them that it s cool, you re a friend. Papyrus, who's so desperate to have cool attacks that he s forgotten to actually make them deadly, and who's interrupted by a dog stealing the bones he intended to throw at you in his next turn.

How you choose to handle things affects how the story plays out. It also affects your replays, with Undertale interested in experimenting with what happens if certain characters remembered what you did the last time, and what the implication of that power might be. Finishing the story only takes about 5-7 hours, but to dig into its secrets takes another couple of loops, and a strong stomach. We re also not just talking a few line changes. Going for a genocide run, where you murder literally everybody, essentially turns the whole thing into a pitch-black horror game. A peaceful run meanwhile leads to one of the most charming and heartfelt RPGs ever made. Murder followed by a reload to see what might have been… well, you get what you deserve.

Undertale obviously has its faults, including a couple of puzzles that wear out their welcome, a first play that s a little too easy to be satisfying, and occasionally relying a bit too much on players getting jokes like a jealous aircraft called the Tsunderplane . If you can t stand those, or the JRPG style in general, it won t likely win you over. Every player also seems to have one area that they dislike, though rarely the same one—for me it was the Hotlands, not because the action was bad, but because the puzzles were time consuming without being satisfying. Luckily, the same location also had one of my favourite characters, as well as one of Undertale s best direct parodies.

To miss it though is to miss out. Undertale isn t simply like Earthbound, like Chrono Trigger, like Final Fantasy VI in its graphical and mechanical style, but a worthy successor to the way they took the JRPG genre and experimented with it, evolved it, took it in new and interesting directions. It s an old-school game, but one designed with modern sensibilities and an eye for deconstruction matched only by Knights Of The Old Republic 2 s brutal assault on the Star Wars universe.

The fact that this is basically a one-person project only makes it more impressive, from the excellent use of simple graphics to convey emotion, to the fantastic lo-fi soundtrack. It may or may not be the best RPG you play this year, but it s certainly going to be one of the most worthwhile—as memorable as anything in, say, The Witcher 3, and every bit as worthy.