Brett Maciech
bmaciech@uwyo.edu
“Undertale” is an affordable, well-written and unique role-playing game (RPG) experience that challenges the player’s morality, easily making it one of this year’s best games.
Whenever you delve into the independently developed game arena, you never really know what you’re going to get. Most of it has the texture of baby vomit, but there are those standout titles that cement themselves into the larger psyche of the videogame industry. I believe “Undertale” is this year’s standout indie title.
The game was developed by Toby Fox and takes place in a world similar to our own, only humankind and monsters were once at war. The humans won the war and the monsters were banished into the underground. Years later, the main character falls down a hole and ends up in this cavernous world. You must survive by any means necessary, but what those means are is where the game outshines all others.
In your standard RPG, the player is forced to battle whatever monster they face with a variety of weapons or spells, whether they want to kill the monster or not. And to be fair, most of the time the monsters in those games are out for your blood as much as you’re out for theirs. “Undertale” wonderfully subverts this tradition.
In this game, the monsters have feelings and personality, desires and dreams, quirks and habits. And the player has the option to use “Actions” such as talking, telling jokes, compliments, flirting and other interpersonal skills in order to pacify whatever monster you’re fighting. This form of “combat” results in a game that is more engaging than any other RPG I’ve ever played.
At no point was I ever dreading a random encounter while exploring the underground. Running into a monster meant more opportunities to wrack my brain and discover a way to get out of that encounter without hurting anyone. A dog-like sentry won’t trust you until you roll around on the ground and pet them a few times to gain their trust. Maybe a monster is really self-conscious about their lame jokes and all you have to do is laugh at the appropriate time or just heckle them until it runs away crying. But the game doesn’t really want you to act like a jerk, and you shouldn’t want to either. Most of the monsters you will face are either huge dorks or pathetically lovable. Attacking them, which is still an option the game gives you, makes you out to be the real monster.
The defensive system in place is also entirely unique. When it’s the monster’s turn to “attack,” the player controls a small heart in a square field and must move around using the arrow keys to dodge bits of whatever is flying your way. This could be tears that fall from the monster’s sprite because they’re lonely, a hopping frog because they’re just being playful, knives that do annoying circular patterns and all kinds of intriguing attacks.
But none of this would be worth that much if the central narrative and characters weren’t engaging and lovable. Like the monsters you fight in combat, the ones you encounter in the “over world” are charming and likable. The story expertly dips back and forth between being gut-bustingly funny and soul-crushingly sad. There’s a point early on in the game that rips out your heart, but then is followed two minutes later by one of the cheapest gags in the book and it works. It won’t work for some, obviously, but I found the mix to be just right.
The real brilliance of this game is that at no point is your ability to kill every monster you see taken away from you. You can butcher all these nice creatures and bloody the underground to your heart’s content, and the game will take notice of that. If you act like an asshole, the world of this game reflects that. If you don’t and you act like a decent human being and empathize with others, you’ll get so much more out of this world. There’ll be tears by the end of it, but along the way you’ll have some good laughs and meet some good people.
