It’s possible that you’ve heard of a game called Crashphalt, but it’s highly unlikely that you ever actually played it. That might sound harsh, but don’t blame me; blame Undertale, as the indie dev behind Crashphalt recently revealed that while its free-to-play game “didn’t set the world on fire” when it released on Steam in 2018, it suddenly began to experience a second life in 2023 after being “taken over” by the mod Undertale Together, which lets people play Toby Fox’s landmark role-playing game Undertale in local co-op.
As spotted by Automaton, the indie dev behind Crashphalt, Cold Pressed Games, explained in a thread on the r/IndieDev subreddit that they noticed “something strange” when they checked the game’s Steam reviews a couple of months ago. The “something strange” in question was that Crashphalt had suddenly earned an “Overwhelmingly Positive” review score on Steam, and that almost every review since 2023 directly mentioned Undertale.
For context, between Crashphalt’s release in October 2018 and December 2022, the game received a grand total of 20 reviews on Steam. From January 2023 to today, almost eight years since Crashphalt’s release, the game has garnered 552 more reviews—and almost all of them make some kind of reference to Toby Fox’s 2015 indie hit Undertale.
Naturally, Cold Pressed Games was more than a little perplexed, so they did a little digging. Turns out, a local multiplayer mod for Undertale, named Undertale Together, was indirectly to blame. Undertale Together allows folks to play Undertale…together, but it only supports local co-op. However, on December 2, 2022, a YouTube account named AMMARO73 posted a video detailing a way to use Crashphalt as a sort of proxy to enable online co-op in Undertale via the Undertale Together mod and Steam Remote Play.
Mystery solved, but what does Cold Pressed Games think about all this? As they explained, in response to the many Crashphalt Steam reviews questioning whether or not the developer was happy about how “no one cares about their game and only uses it to mod other games,” they’re cool with it.
“I actually don’t mind what Crashphalt has become. I’ve long since moved on to other projects, so I think its really cool to see that the game has found a second life,” stated Cold Pressed Games on Reddit. “Undertale came out around the same time I was getting into game dev, and was incredibly inspiring to me. So I think its really cool that it’s found a way to impact the community even if in a small way and act as a way for friends to play the game together.”
Hopefully this leads in some way to people actually playing Crashphalt, as it honestly looks pretty fun, like a cute mix between TowerFall and Nidhogg. At the very least, perhaps the attention can be used to shine a light on the “other projects” that Cold Pressed Games is currently working on.