Undertale was a very emotional game for me – and perhaps the most notable moment in this journey was when the player finally approaches the castle of King Asgore, where the backstory of human-monster relations is explained via cinematic cutscene. Prior to this, lore had only been fed to the player bit by bit, gathered in pieces from conversations overheard or rumors barely remembered. The playable character does not talk, as if to set in stone that your journey is to be one of observation, of listening and learning. Yet once you get to this part of the story, the player is revealed more than just the answers to many of their questions – they are given a new lens to view their past, learned information. Where the player once saw how kind or cruel a character they interacted with was, they could now see why that character was so. They could see that once morally black and white actions now seem so nuanced. This addition of reason, of context to the observations the player saw prior was a powerful moment to me. I realized that I got to gather this information first “untainted”, as an innocent party, unknowing of the context behind such goodness or malady. The game let me learn the world and its esthetic instead of “spoiling” it for me with prior conflict. The world felt so big before without it all, just with me exploring and learning; the addition of heartbreak made it all feel like so much.
