There's a lot of games that go for meta. Meta on the nature of games themselves, using the fact that the game is a game as a narrative tool, etc. I am not a fan of most that try to go for this for one simple reason: It's so easy to just be lazy with meta.

Sure, there's games like the platformer game whose name escapes me where you do everything backwards and the occasional joke is harmless and in many cases entertaining. What irks me are games that do their meta halfheartedly. For this example, I'm going to be looking at Undertale.

Undertale is a game I enjoy a lot. It's quirky, got some really good writing, and all around an enjoyable romp. This does not apply for the meta parts of Undertale in my opinion. The meta stuff serves little to no purpose in the narrative outside of the stuff with Chara and Flowey which I feel throws a wrench into the storyline they have in the proper game.

I like Flowey as a tragic, evil character when he isn't trying to guilt trip the player about stuff since the game does that plenty fine by itself when it needs to. I honestly hate the fact Chara "takes over" in the Genocide route and wipes your save file. To me, it just feels like the game needed a way to end the game and the devs couldn't think of anything else. In terms of guilt, the phone calls from Sans in the worse Neutral endings are far more effective than anything either character does.

I honestly wish the post-Genocide save wipe was permanent. It'd genuinely be a meta thing that I think is really cool. You, the player, wiped out the world. You cannot fix what you broke. You have to live with it now. But naaaaah you can just put it back with minimal consequences aside from Flowey nagging at you which I already think is the worst part of his character, and Chara's adjustment of the True Pacifist ending which at the very least I think is kinda interesting.

At the end of the day, though, my main issue with Undertale's "groundbreaking meta narrative" is that the meta part of it feels very unimportant compared to the rest of the game. The fact that you have to break your innate gamer habits for the true ending is something I think is a clever concept, I do like this idea a lot. I just wish Undertale committed more in its narrative or committed LESS in its narrative. It stands in a very strange uncanny valley of meta as is.

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In my opinion, video game metas are best when the entire game leans into that. OneShot is a master class in video game meta as a narrative as well as making for very clever gameplay, Doki Doki Literature Club is very much in the same ballpark, even SuperHot applies really well. I just like my meta in games to be more than "Haha! We're in a video game! Ain't that clever!"