WARNING: Undertale is a game best played without spoilers. If you are intending to play it with the best experience, please do not read this post.

Game Summary

Website: http://undertale.com/
Demo: http://undertale.com/demo.htm
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hojv0m3TqA

Undertale is an indie 2D single-player RPG game developed by Toby Fox using GameMaker: Studio, available on Windows, OS X, and Linux platforms.

The game is set in a world inhabited by both humans and monsters. A war broke out between the two races many years ago, one which the humans won and went on to seal and trap all monsters underground using a magical barrier.

The player takes on the role of a child who climbs a mountain and accidentally falls into the underground, beginning a quest to look for a way to leave.

Features (using the Elemental Tetrad)

Aesthetics

Graphics-wise, the game isn’t going to win any awards. Undertale uses 8-bit pixelized graphics, with nothing special to speak of. However, given the nature and relative simplicity of the game, I find it fairly appropriate that such old-school graphics are used. It shifts focus away from graphics and places more emphasis on the gam

Mechanics

The controls of the game are simple and intuitive, similar to that of console games. Movement is done via arrow keys, with a few other multipurpose keys used to interact with/select things, or open the menu, etc.

The combat system is instanced and turn-based, simplistic in offense but can be challenging in defense.

You attack by stopping a moving vertical line as close to the center as you can get (see above), dealing more damage the more accurate you are. You receive attacks from monsters in bullet hell mode, making the focus of combat avoiding attacks. Instead of attacking on your turn, you may choose to check the monster’s combat information, interact with your opponent, attempt to spare their lives or flee from battle. Sparing monsters isn’t straightforward all the time, often you need to sufficiently interact with the monster first.

Story

The story is simple. You start off in the ruins of the underground where you meet a kind, motherly figure who takes care of you. Eventually, you leave her to look for a way to leave the underground. Along the way, you meet monsters of all kind and learn of their desire to one day leave the underground, a future which their king promises will happen. You journey to meet this king, and your choices along the way affects the outcome of your quest.

The Lens of Meaningful Choices

The most common recurring choice you’ll make in the game is whether or not to spare the life of a monster you encounter in battle. The game operates on morality, and killing monsters, especially key characters in the game, will alter your playing experience one way, and choosing to help or befriend them will yield different results. Most of all, a lot of these choices question your morality, and you decide whether you want to be a serial killer or a gentle pacifist. At the end of the game, you do feel as if the result was brought about by your own actions, and if you had done things differently, they would have turned out differently.

Perhaps the most meaningful choice I had to make was at the end of the game, involving the evil, nihilistic, almost insane villain, who tormented you and everyone around you throughout the game, who tried to kill everyone and you, whom you have just defeated. Despite all that he has done, you are once again given a final choice — to spare him or to kill him. It is at this point where one truly learns the meaning of “mercy”, an action freely and easily given to all the innocent creatures you met, that only now is a difficult decision. Furthermore, the villain doesn’t beg for mercy, and keeps rejecting your attempts to spare his life, even threatening to make you pay for letting him live. Will you remain steadfast in your choice?

The Lens of Judgement

Towards the end of the game, a character will quite literally pass judgement on you based on your actions, more specifically how many monsters you have killed (based on your experience points and character level). The game “rewards” you with a happy ending if you have played it through without killing a single monster (you and the entire monsterkind gets freed from the underground and return to the surface to live in peace). On the other hand, the more kills you rack up, the “worse” the outcome of the game is, the worst being the destruction of the entire in-game universe (yes, that somehow happens). As you can see, the game judges players for their lack of digital morals, though this may not be a bad thing, since it gives you a chance to play as the villian. If you take the lives of monsters excessively, you will end up being treated like a villian, with mass evacuation taking place, all monsters fear you and loathe you. In fact, going the violent route actually makes the game more boring. You don’t meet many characters, combat involves you mindlessly slaying things, and you miss out on a lot of other things you can do when you’re not treated like a terrorist. This just reinforces the game’s stance on morality and encourages you to be a good person.

The Lens of Emotion

You get to know better or befriend a lot of quirky characters along the way, and form an emotional bond with them. You learn quickly that monsters are very much just like humans. This goes hand-in-hand with the lens of meaningful choices, and makes it sweeter when you manage to rescue everyone from the underground, and also harder to kill off characters like these.

The Lens of Novelty

An interesting design of the game is the way it breaks the fourth wall by incorporating saving and loading into part of the game world’s mechanics. The game allows one save slot, representing one universe, and the act of saving and loading the game is treated as a power of your child, a power that the being with the most determination can use, a power that used to belong to another character until the child fell into the underground and overwrote his capabilities. You have the power to restart the world at checkpoints and take different routes from there. The memories of monsters are (mostly) reset to that point accordingly, which coincide with the normal effects of saving and re-loading the game, but not entirely. A lot of characters seem to have some sort of déjà vu when you replay a part of the game. One character in particular has conducted research on timelines and notices many timelines starting and stopping, jumping back and forth. He suspects that someone is able to control it, and notices when you re-load the game again and skip through previously read dialogue, mentioning how he believes you’ve already read this dialogue before somehow.

Also interesting to note is that shop NPCs won’t buy items from you, just like how you can’t go to a supermarket and sell your junk. Why would they buy random stuff off customers?

The Lens of the State Machine

Undertale uses states to alter the storyline based on your actions. The first example is re-loading the game and replaying a part of it, with characters reacting a bit differently the second time round. Characters that are killed do not appear in the rest of the story, and they also affect other characters that may be close to them. A lot of conversations and some choices in game change or becomes available only when you have been through certain previous events.

Of special note to me is the when you achieve the worst ending in-game by excessive murder, resulting in the destruction of the universe by a powerful soul (which also intentionally crashes your game). When you run the game again, all you get is a black void. If you wait 10 minutes, the soul appears and reminds you of what you have done, but offers to re-create the world and let you play again, however, from that point onwards, your game is permanently “scarred”, and this powerful character will taint happy endings you try to achieve after having once gone down the path of no return, by slightly altering them visually to remind you of what you did.

Final Words

Video on some key features of Undertale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkJ8C1MEKLs