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Thank you for sending that in, i'll add it to the conversation.
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I know nada about this guy but I do think it's odd he claims he's completely unaware if it's even possible for him to do so.
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Well this is their first game on steam. They may not know their developer tools available to them.
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Could be. I'd rather believe there's one less dev out there doing shady things like that, but I'm also a cynic.
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It seems pretty fair to say that these reviews are being flagged and temporarily removed for steam moderator viewing. Definitely seems like they still exist, but they are being hidden some how. We just need to know who.
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They're not temporarily removed, though. They still appear on the list, but collapsed!
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I did look for them but didn't find any. I'll check again to see if I just overlooked them.
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Yeah, I'm not sure, but here it says Positive (334) and Negative (0). In the case of a flagged review, it would still be counted among the Negative reviews. As I said, I don't know what's going on, but I vote glitch. :P
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I was going to suggest you message Steam support or the dev himself, but it seems it's not necessary anymore. :P
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Maybe. Toby could be lying. I don't have any proof for that though. It might be one of the other developers, I don't know if it's just toby or someone else. But fact of the matter is. The reviews are disappearing almost instantaneously.
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But the FAQ says they can't remove reviews! :P He might be lying as much as Steam might be.
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It only explicitly states he cannot delete them, not that he can't do anything which would make them temporarily unavailable. That said I'm also willing to accept that it's the work of a very...let's say "enthusiastic" group of fans or some such who are flagging them.
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"not that he can't do anything which would make them temporarily unavailable"
To confirm, are you saying that there's no power in their hands to make reviews temporarily unavailable?
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The thing is... NOTHING that people do will remove reviews from Steam. Only Steam can remove them. So, I certainly doubt Steam would remove all negative reviews just because a bunch of people flagged it as inappropriate. It's a possibility that Steam is screwing up, but I doubt it. :P I vote that it's a glitch, it's happened before.
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Also possible. I'm still scrolling through the reviews (between doing other things) to see if I can find any collapsed reviews.
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One of them was likely removed by the creator, after they applied for a refund. Not sure about the others.
Actually, that is an interesting point. Given how much the game costs, and how marmite-like the game is, it wouldn't be too far-fetched to assume that getting a refund (and the game removed from your library) also scrubs your review for it?
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Send what?
"They went missing. We have no idea who is involved or why, but we're going to randomly guess it's the dev."
Usually if you're going to outright sabotage someone's reputation before it has even started, you could use a solid reason or y'know, evidence, or a compelling reason.
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If devs could hide/delete reviews... then we would have seen a lot more of it by now. Not to mention that it makes no sense what so ever. Vavle has been working for a long time now to open up Steam and make the whole publishing thing idiot proof. Making a system that could so blatantly be abused just wouldn't work. They wouldn't do it like that.
Besides, there's positives reviews coming in at a steady pace. Apparently a lot of people do enjoy this game... the dev would have to be insane to risk getting pulled from Steam when the majority of reviews would be positive anyway?
My money would be on that this is just a glitch in the system.
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My money is on rabid fans flagging reviews to take them out of circulation at least temporarily.
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Likewise. It's a noted fact that various anonymous chan boards have been fans of Undertale since way back before the kickstarter was even a thing. While it's dumb to paint any chan as a hivemind that is totally synchronised, they do breed certain levels of "me too"ism, and there will always be a handful of idiots on standby to coordinate things like this.
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I don't know about that. These reviews are disappearing almost instantaneously. But they appear to still exist but not to be read by the general public.
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To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if the developers were hiding the reviews -- and if they were insidious enough to do so, wouldn't they be insidious enough to lie about it too?
I found the demo to be very heavy-handed, unsubtle, and pretentious, which is part of why I did not even remotely take it seriously and acted like a complete retard in my video playthrough of it (the other being that I'm not anywhere close to a professional when playing vider games.) It's the kind of product I would expect from someone who filters reviews (though I don't consider this to be even remotely plausible evidence that they're actually doing so.)
I would probably play through the full version, at least a little further than in the demo, but I'm not at all impressed by the game and to be frank the only good part of it is the Toriel porn.
Feel free to censor this post! >_>
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To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if the developers were hiding the reviews -- and if they were insidious enough to do so, wouldn't they be insidious enough to lie about it too?
I found the demo to be very heavy-handed, unsubtle, and pretentious, which is part of why I did not even remotely take it seriously and acted like a complete retard in my video playthrough of it (the other being that I'm not anywhere close to a professional when playing vider games.) It's the kind of product I would expect from someone who filters reviews (though I don't consider this to be even remotely plausible evidence that they're actually doing so.)
I would probably play through the full version, at least a little further than in the demo, but I'm not at all impressed by the game and to be frank the only good part of it is the Toriel porn.
Feel free to censor this post! >_>
Done! Sorta?
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It was trying to be an indepth game about pacifism but instead became basically, Metal Gear Solid RPG.
That is, you "kill" your enemies non-lethally for a higher score, and non-lethal "kills" are usually more difficult than lethal ones.
That's neither new, creative, nor insightful.
EDIT: Also, the game attempted to guilt trip me for killing enemies because "what if they have families?!" They don't. They're throwaway enemies you suddenly decided had families. If you wanted them to have full lives and families, this should have been hinted at and supported all along the game up to that point, not suddenly pulled out as a plot twist.
I'll give it credit for the one subtlety it did have however, which is Toriel beginning to miss on purpose when your HP is low enough because she wants you to kill her.
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Um. No. You don't get "points" for winning with pacifism. You don't get any exp or gold or anything. If anything, you're just shooting yourself in the foot and making the game harder by not choosing to kill your foes.
The point of pacifism is your choice in deciding if you want to take their life, or preserve it. Or a mixture of the two. It's a story, if you don't treat it like that worlds reality, it's going to seem and be stupid to you.
Also Toriel doesn't want you to kill her. Your her child. She can see you're hurt and doesn't want to hurt you. Look up at her when you're low on health and she's attacking. She looks away from you.
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The score I'm talking about is metaphorical. The "points" are the flower not trying to guilt-trip you for being a Bad Person Yes You The Player For Real.
It seems you don't even understand the game yourself. This explains a lot about its fans.
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That's stupid. Flowey can't guilt-trip you because you didn't do anything bad yet. Unless if in the final version they include the parts where you steal candy. But you didn't do anything wrong. What would Flowey guilt-trip you with. You were merciful and spared everyone.
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You don't understand what I'm saying to you either. I see no point in continuing.
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Then explain yourself in greater detail. Also you only played the demo. You don't know what comes after you leave. That's just one instance.
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Deconstructions sometimes it sets you up for a suckerpunch to drive a point home initially. In this case, the character of Flowey is deilberately twistedly antagonistic. The game itself doesn't really outline a lot regarding familial connections and such, but Flowey however races ahead to anything it can use to twist the knife on you. I found it worked quite well, even when from the very start of the game back on my original demo play years ago, I saw Toriel and immediately thought "Oh, this is transparent, no, I refuse to latch onto this sympathetic figure". It still got me, once the goofy exaggeration, humour and the little signs/tells inside the house worked their way past my defenses though.
I think it's one of those games where you just need to suspend your disbelief and not expect a subtle masterwork, and just take it for what it is. I wonder if this is the burning backwash of all the hype the first players are spreading? Go in expecting nothing, get powerfully surprised. Go in expecting amazement, see only tired tropes and empty gestures. Totally a marmite game, which may make the price point a real burn for people who aren't 'feeling' the game.
They really need to link that demo from the website up to the steam store so people can know what they're getting themselves into.
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It's not my job to go out of my way to suspend my disbelief. If you fail to do that, you didn't write your story well, and Undertale did not.
Flowey was just an obnoxious edgelord straight out of an anime.
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Meh, I feel it was written as well as it needed to be, given the game doesn't make claims of being profound or close-knit to the real human experience (quite the opposite, as the unsubtle emotional wreckingballs were supposed to blindside you, hamfisted as they were). The heaviness was supposed to be a sudden and unpleasant contrast from the goofy childrens-story style approach. Swing and a miss for you, I suppose. That's the marmite factor.
Or perhaps the correct time to use "more than the sum of it's parts"? I've never had chance to use that phrase correctly :P
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And how are you sure what elements of the game story were "supposed" to do? That and "meh different strokes" are classical excuses for failure and mistakes.
I can readily admit I would probably not be anywhere near so bitter towards the game if I hadn't been swamped with the sudden rush of simple-minded tools going on and on about how profound and ground-breaking its demo was, but the fact remains that the design and writing decisions made within the game offend me, and would regardless of the hype.
Quite honestly, I see no reason why the game even gives you the option of killing anyone and yet progressing in the story, since the entire point of the game is Don't Do That. The narrative is completely undermined and uninteresting unless you do what they want you to, especially since the character has nothing interesting to say ("Because it's yoooooouu!!!" is a bland get-out-of-writing-free cliche that should never be used.)
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It's worth noting that the few negative reviews did seem to get swamped by fans of the game, for not being fair or well-written.
It seems most likely that there is a group/gathering of fans somewhere that are coordinating reports on the negative reviews, and due to the numbers any of the global store moderators might see them as a priority to respond to. If one of the moderators is a fan, that also makes sense.
Just randomly assuming the dev is doing it is a complete shortcut of logic, and rallying people around the notion when the game has only been released days ago really does whiff a little bit of sabotage.
Can we please not manufacture drama and actually wait for compelling reason before we lynch and new, promising indie dev?
I mean seriously, jeez.
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Hey I did admit that I gave into emotion before logic. That's why the updates which are steadily more logical and changing thread name isn't so... conclusive.
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Yeaaah, but it's a loaded subject and people love to assume the worst.
Consider how when you made a hype thread to point out it's release, people were all too happy to line up their pre-canned troll lines to say that it's bundle padding, and that they're going to buy it just to spite the game with a negative review...
...but then when you make a thread like this, suddenly the responses show a lot more solidarity, because they have something they can rail against.
It worries me because the dev here has shown with this game that he has a lot of potential, and to stir this kind of subject without being very careful of neutrality and tone, it could potentially shoot them in the foot before they even get out of the starting block, and likely without a single ill act or intent on their part. I'm all for lynching the people proven to have been underhanded, but this is a double-dose of cringe, IMO. :s
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I don't love to assume the worse. My brain is just absolutely awful and my thinking is terrible thanks to a lot of current life circumstances.. If you read my responses here, you'll see the following.
I treated evidence as proof.
I made baseless accusations.
Conclusive thoughts without considering alternatives.
And then there's missing information and not considering multiple perspectives.
Also I see. Well i'm gulity then. I'm an idiot. Not much I can do currently.
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Look up "confirmation bias", which explains the phenomenon quite well. A lot of people do it, especially when their paranoia gets tickled. We're getting so used to underhanded devs that we're getting a little alarmist over these things.
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According to a friend who released his game on Steam a year ago, developers aren't able to delete reviews. They are able to flag them, but they will still appear in the negative reviews section. The FAQ about Steam Reviews says that developers aren't able to delete reviews as well.
So here's my guess: Many players which like the game reported every negative review, which resulted in deletion of the negative reviews by a Steam moderator, probably because the negative review was non-constructive.
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that is indeed the case. at least its written in the FAQ
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Update 3: Okay. So I just got a comment reporting that Toby Fox doesn't know how to delete or hide reviews and doesn't even know if it's possible. According to Toby Fox, they're aware of 2 reviews (I am aware of 4-5) that were written. They go on to say that they just "disappeared" They state that they have no idea where they went or what happened to them. Here's a link to the comment if you wish to read it yourself. Click Me
Please remember this doesn't mean it's fact and that this doesn't mean that Toby Fox does indeed not know about those tools.
Though from my personal experience with one of the missing negative reviews. I was re-routed to the users recommendations page which has only two reviews when on their profile is says 3 and shows the undertale review link on the players recent game activity.
This is what happens when a review is removed by a steam moderator -> Click
So the developers may have flagged and have the remove hidden. Or the fanbase may have done so, or something else. We are not sure. But it still stands that on Machaeus's profile. The Undertale review still exists, however we cannot access it.
Update 2: It's pretty up in the air right now, but Undertale MIGHT be censoring reviews. We're discussing below and trying to find and reach out to people who've written negative reviews and ask them about what happened. We're also considering multiple possibilities such as how Toby Fox is a internet famous musician for making music for the famous HomeStuck series. So maybe people banded together to remove any and all negative reviews or stuff like that. Anyways, the data below is things I posted when I first wrote this review and the following edit.
Yeah, me the undertale lady who's incredibly hyped about undertale. Well i've been watching undertale closely all day today and I can confirm they're censoring and removing reviews. I've been getting screenshots and keeps links of negative reviews and they just disappear. So I don't really know what to do. But Toby Fox (fwdgradation) or someone on their team is removing(or hiding) negative reviews.
Undertale
Currently they still have a "perfect" score. As of this moment, it is 310 positive reviews out of 310 reviews. Which I have a few negative reviews.
Edit: I managed to recover one of the links. See here. Click me. You'll see that that user has indeed played undertale recently on their recently played games profile. However, if you click on the link that says "review 1" for their undertale review. You get nothing. It leads you to their recommendations page and undertale is non-existent. However their profile says that it exists. However we cannot access it. The developers hid it. I saw it and read it this morning and now it is gone.
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