The hype from Undertale is still inescapable on Twitter at times. (It's well justified; all of the characters seem extremely likable.) A friend recently got me to try the demo too, and Toriel stole my heart right away. The music is also very outstanding.
One aspect of the game is putting me on the fence about buying it. The final release of Undertale is made with Game Maker Studio, and that's not a bad thing at all. GML has gotten better over the years. What's scaring me is how the game itself appears to be put together. (Nothing is ever as bad as anything Bethesda publishes, though. Undertale is not remotely close to that.)
The Steam bug thread revealed things that somebody familiar with Game Maker wouldn't normally do or use. Not that I was expecting the dev to be a pro, and the rest of the issues seem to be with running the game under Windows 10. That's not Undertale's fault at all. Win10 is a relatively new release, and it's one of many reasons I'm avoiding upgrading to that OS; decent compatibility might take a year or two to attain.
Despite a few odd bits of coding choices, the game runs really well for my friends who own the game, so speed is not an issue. I think Studio compiled games run much more efficiently than previous GM versions, so the dev could afford to use more events in objects and let a few things go unoptimized.
That's what makes me on the fence. It seems a bit off internally, and at the same time, it runs fine. 99% of the people playing it aren't running into problems, so it's likely that my faith is shaky more than anything. SRB2's own source is a disastrous spaghetti labyrinth of untold hellish hacks and poor commenting straight from coder purgatory that nobody can make sense of without selling their soul to an ancient demon when they first open it, and that never stopped me from enjoying the game. Lord knows the greatly endeared Sonic Classics were rush jobs in the ASM department too.
The only truly, seriously bad thing I'd have to say about Undertale is the demo. It's an ancient, outdated piece of work the programmer wrote with Game Maker 8.1, then didn't optimize one bit. I say that because it's even more demanding than the bloated, broken mess that is Minecraft. (60-80% CPU usage versus 16% reported of the final game.) I wouldn't be surprised if the programmer didn't know what instance activation/deactivation was, one of the most elementary aspects of coding with Game Maker to get decent speeds in object-heavy rooms. It also appears to be using five different sound libraries; God help us if they're all running at once.
Maybe I'm being horribly anal, but I've been using GML for ten years and I'm still learning new things, so things like that stand out to me. I try to write my code as cleanly as possible, optimizing when I can without losing my mind. Then I see a game with the internal problems Undertale has selling for $10, and wonder why they didn't use some of that hefty 51k from their kickstarter to hire somebody who knew what they were doing. The creator even told me in an email that he wasn't a good programmer.
Seriously, where did all that kickstarter money go? Freedom Planet is arguably a much larger, visually prettier, more demanding game, and Strife only had a fifth of Undertale's budget.
Besides me sitting on the fence over totally inconsequential things about the game itself, Undertale seems like a great title for me to get later. I just don't know when, because Shovel Knight on GoG is tempting me, as well as the fact that I have enough money right now for a Wii.