Game: Undertale
- arget audience: Fans of RPGs, players interested in moral choice and emotional storytelling, indie game enthusiasts.
- Creator: Toby Fox
- Platform: PC, Mac, Linux, Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One
From its opening moments, Undertale challenges the conventions of role-playing games—not through spectacle, but through quiet resistance. Instead of pushing the player toward conquest or power, it constructs a world where every encounter is a question of empathy. Beneath its retro visuals lies a tightly woven narrative and mechanical system that makes one thing clear: you are not just playing in this world—you are responsible for it. Every choice you make, every life you spare or take, shapes how the story unfolds and how the world remembers you. In doing so, Undertale transforms gameplay into a moral dialogue between player and system.
Narrative and Formal Mechanisms of Immersion
Undertale breaks the fourth wall not as a gimmick, but as a mechanic of trust and consequence. The game’s formal systems are intricately tied to its narrative worldbuilding. Most RPGs encourage combat as the default mode of interaction, but Undertale disrupts this through its “ACT” and “MERCY” systems, which allow players to talk, console, flirt, joke, or show mercy to enemies rather than kill them. This mechanical design creates a fundamental narrative tension: do you play as the traditional “hero” who defeats all in their path, or do you try to understand and befriend the beings around you?
The world itself reinforces this choice. Every enemy has a personality.
A froggit can be intimidated or complimented.
A skeleton named Papyrus dreams of being accepted. Even the final boss—depending on your path—isn’t a villain, but a person with deep emotional scars. The writing is often funny, sometimes unsettling, and always revealing. Through layers of flavor text, battle dialogue, and subtle environmental cues (like the abandoned toys and dusty books in Asgore’s house), the game builds a world that feels alive, emotionally textured, and interconnected.
What’s crucial is that Undertale doesn’t just ask you to read a story—it demands you act within it. The choices you make—whether to kill or spare—are not reversible by saving and reloading. The game remembers. The world reacts with disappointment, sadness, or even meta-awareness, depending on what you’ve done. By tying narrative stakes directly to player behavior, the game creates not only immersion, but complicity.
Environmental Storytelling
The game’s world is stitched together from small, hauntingly resonant spaces. Waterfall, with its soft blue glow and ghostly music, tells a story of decline and memory.
Hotland, with its overheated pipes and lab experiments, reflects ambition and ethical failure.
The Ruins, where the game begins, are filled with melancholic signs left by monsters clinging to hope.
Importantly, none of these spaces are exposition dumps. Instead, their stories are told through implied context: dusty books, broken toys, flower beds. These cues accumulate into a world you feel like you know—not because the game told you, but because you lived it. This makes the moral weight of your actions tangible. Sparing or killing isn’t just a strategic choice—it becomes a form of world-shaping.
Ethical Reflection: The Body as Choice
Undertale presents a unique take on the depiction of bodies and traits. Unlike traditional RPGs, it doesn’t anchor characters in rigid racial or class-based abilities. Monsters are diverse in form and function, but their traits—strength, kindness, humor, jealousy—are not dictated by biology.
Toriel is a towering goat-mother who bakes pies and shelters you. Napstablook is a ghost who suffers from depression and quietly makes music. Alphys is a lizard scientist who is awkward and queer-coded.
Traits in Undertale emerge from narrative context, not racial essentialism. The player character is also notably blank—a “fallen human” without assigned race, gender, or origin. The game seems to say: your choices matter more than your body. Still, the game subtly wrestles with essentialist tropes. Some monsters are framed as inherently dangerous (like Flowey, whose “lack of soul” is biologically stated). Others, like boss characters, have their power anchored in physical inheritance.
If I were to mod the game to further challenge biological determinism, I’d modify Flowey’s mechanics to de-emphasize his “soullessness” as a fixed evil state. Instead, I’d introduce a narrative arc in which Flowey can rediscover fragments of his lost identity through interaction—not as redemption, but as critique of the “you are what you were born as” logic. I’d also add minor quests that allow monsters to change their attack patterns through learning or reflection, reinforcing that traits—even in battle—can be shaped.
Conclusion
Undertale doesn’t just build a world; it builds a mirror. Through its subtle systems and heartfelt writing, it asks: What kind of person are you? And what kind of world do your actions create? In answering that, the player is drawn into a web of care and consequence that lingers far beyond the game’s closing screen. It is one of the rare titles where “saving the world” doesn’t mean defeating a villain—it means deciding what kind of player you want to be.
