I’m absolutely in love with Undertale, though everyone else over here seems to be a bit chillier toward it than me. That’s okay. They’re allowed to be stupid and dumb. I gave them permission. It is a superbly written fantasy-adventure game with strong mechanics that embrace but enrich the Zelda vein, and at only $10, it’s impossible to hate (pretending that my roommates don’t exist.)

It’s an amazingly simple, yet grand-scaled game, and it has absolutely captured my headspace with its simple but charming graphics and some incredibly clean-cut, sharp writing. Little details, like learning from dialogue that one of the NPC’s is lonesome, and then remembering that there were clues about this scattered through the area–without being huge distractions–add up very quickly into an impressively complete, compelling world.

The combat system is ultimately what got my interest long enough for me to notice the writing, though. The simple ability to not fight things becomes a compelling challenge, especially as critters get a bit harder to figure out, and when they gang up on you, this compounds on itself in a beautiful, natural way. There’s simultaneously time to think about what your strategy is going to be, while also having a twitchy minigame that ramps up in difficulty depending on the fight.

The great writing, incidentally, permeates this system. Without spoilers, a fairly early game fight leaves it obvious through game mechanics alone that the person you’re fighting doesn’t want to kill you–and this is both world-enriching and deeply, deeply satisfying to me.

Undertale is a beautiful novella wrapped in a game, while simultaneously being a game before any of its other qualities. I have a suspicion that the developers have been watching a lot of Extra Credits, because there is simply no way that the additive simple beauties of this game came about through anything other than a razor-sharp understanding of what games are and why people play them.

This game might actually be the Platonic ideal Zelda-esque RPG, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.