Undertale is an unconventional RPG game on Steam, also available on Nintendo Switch, PS4, and Xbox, developed by Toby Fox in 2015. The target audience of the game is 10+ with a focus on meta-narrative lovers and RPG enthusiasts. Through its ACT/MERCY procedures, its route-driven outcome structure, and embedded narrative, Undertale makes the player feel connected and responsible for every character in the Underground.
The game’s true core mechanic is disguised under the narrative of RPG. When players encounter monsters on their journey of going home, they may either treat them as relationships to be built or obstacles. The core mechanic, the ACT/MERCY system, determines the route that the player takes through the world. Particularly, each monster has a unique set of ACT options (complimenting, flirting, petting, shooing) that the player must discover through trial and attention to find the ones that could spare them. The formal element of procedures here both teaches the player about each monster’s personality and incites players to spare the monsters instead of fighting them. From a game design perspective, this separates Undertale from other traditional RPG games, like D&D, where the only option to interact with monsters is by eliminating them. In a way, this mechanic more closely simulates the relationships of the real world, where in challenging circumstances you still have a chance to try to be nice to other people, even though it may be at cost.
This design choice is an exemplification of Jenkins’s concept of embedded narrative; there are only minimal text-driven narratives for context setting, while most details are distributed across the environment for players to discover through observations and dialogues. This is a great way game design could cater to both players who enjoy narrative in digital games, who may choose to spend time interacting to get the full story, and players who want to have a fast gameplay experience just with the core structure. In particular, a game design component that made Undertale so successful as a game, with a huge and highly active fan group constantly outputting high-view memes and fan content, is the personalization of each character. Each character not only has their unique word choices, ACT/MERCY options, and appearances, but also has mechanics that are characterized. For example, Muffet, a spider, has spider-shaped attacks mechanism. While Papyrus first seems like a dutiful Royal Guard who just wants to catch a human for reputation, players end up discovering that he is soft-hearted, would worry sick if you went missing, and eventually is just a soul who wants to be befriended. The aesthetic of empathy emerges from the dynamic of paying attention to character behavior, which itself stems from the mechanic of context-specific interaction options.
Environmental storytelling reinforces this effect. Waterfall, the game’s third major area, is filled with Echo Flowers that replay overheard fragments of monster wishes, fears, and memories. In one instance, when players interact with an Echo Flower, they hear a monster’s wish upon a star, while the final ending reveals that monsters cannot see the stars from underground. The setting is an exemplification of the narrative element of location, where place can work symbolically to ground the player in the emotional reality of the world. By setting up these easter eggs and plot points to pay off later, players feel like they were indeed experiencing something tangible. This game design effectively utilizes game areas and incorporates interactions to communicate history without cutscenes.
The world that Undertale is building is one with morals. Undertale tracks every kill and every mercy across a playthrough. Specifically, the Pacifist route rewards empathy with a story about breaking cycles of violence. On the contrary, the Genocide route condemns the violence with an empty world. Characters that the player met on their journey become absent. Perhaps more touching than a scripted death, Undertale makes players feel the world become less worth inhabiting when they chose to simplify the game with violence all the way. This connects to the concept of agency as a formal element: players have the agency to freely choose the way they interact, and they will end up seeing different outcomes that reflect their choices.
One design limitation is that there’s not much hint about resource management. When I was playing, I exhausted my resources as soon as I got them in fear of not being able to carry new items or dying soon in battle; this made it particularly hard to battle later monsters like Muffet, whose attack can be avoided by a resource that appeared very early in the game. I feel like if the game could give more subtle hints to make players realize some elements and resources will be needed long term, players would have a more coherent gameplay experience.
In Undertale, the mechanics that encode assumptions about the body majorly manifest in the Genocide track. With the choice of sparing removed, EXP and LOVE become “execution points” and “Level of Violence.” Gaining LOVE is not growth, it is a record of harm, against the traditional RPG labeling. Interestingly, the game treats the capacity for violence as something that physically changes you: your attacks hit harder, your HP increases. I think the message this mechanic is trying to get across is that violence is not just a choice but also a bodily transformation that compounds with repetition.
Ultimately, Undertale succeeds as a world-building game because it refuses to let the player remain a passive tourist. Every mechanic, from the ACT menu to the kill counter, asks the player to deliberately make choice of as they understand the Underground. It is a world that does not just exist for the player to explore, but remembers.
