Undertale 10th Anniversary

An anniversary edition of a role-playing game whose central idea was that you never have to fight. Every encounter has a non-violent resolution — talk, spare, understand — and the game tracks which route you take across the whole playthrough, changing dialogue, characters and endings accordingly. That tracking is what made the original remarkable and it is intact here. Battles are bullet-dodging sequences during the enemy's turn, which keeps them mechanically engaging whichever route you choose, and the writing does the rest — characters recur, notice what you have done, and respond to it in ways that reward a second playthrough with completely different material. It takes several hours for one route and considerably more to see the others, saves progress, and is worth playing attentively rather than rushing. It needs a keyboard, runs on anything, and the audio is a substantial part of the experience. The anniversary presentation adds polish without changing what the game is, which is the correct decision for a project celebrating something people are protective of. Anyone coming to it for the first time should avoid reading about it beforehand. A great deal of what makes the game work depends on not knowing what it is going to do, and the anniversary edition is as good a first encounter as any.