Notes:
Game Overview
- Title: Undertale
- Creator: Toby Fox and Temmie Chang
- Platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux, PlayStation 4, PS Vita, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One. I played on Steam.
- Target audience: Rated E10+. In practice it speaks most directly to teens and adults who know classic JRPGs like EarthBound, because much of its humor and critique depends on the player already expecting RPG conventions. But this convention didn’t bother me even if I didn’t play a lot JRPGs.
- Official webpage: https://undertale.com
- Time played: around 2 hours, mainly doing the begining and the Ruins.
Summary. (I integrated the story that I knew from watching several detailed commentary videos): A human child falls into the Underground, where monsters have been sealed beneath the earth since a war with humanity. A talking flower named Flowey greets you with the game’s first thesis: in this world, it is “kill or be killed.” Toriel, a gentle goat-like caretaker, guides you through the Ruins, but to leave you must confront her. Beyond the Ruins, the snowy town of Snowdin introduces the skeleton brothers Sans and Papyrus, whose puzzles and jokes turn danger into comedy, before the marshes of Waterfall bring the hunter Undyne. Every encounter, from a nervous frog to a boss, can be ended either by fighting or by talking your way to mercy, and the story remembers which you chose.
Genre and Its Effect on the Message
Undertale is a role-playing game, but its genre is a hybrid. Exploration and dialogue follow a top-down JRPG model, with a combat system.
The genre is not just a container for the message; it is the message. Traditional RPGs teach that progress equals violence: players have to defeat enemies to earn EXP, raise the LV, and get stronger. Undertale keeps those conventions fully visible so it can question them. Flowey introduces LV as “LOVE,” and the game eventually reframes the stats as “Execution Points” and “Level of Violence” (I learned the full meaning through a commentary video). Therefore, growth becomes a record of harm.
Connections to Course Concepts
Procedural rhetoric: Bogost argues that games make claims through processes: the gestures a game’s rules allow and disallow construct its meaning. Undertale‘s case for mercy lives in its rules more than its dialogue. Killing is fast and pays out in EXP and gold. Sparing means exploring each monster’s small possibility space of ACT options until you find what it needs. Like Bogost’s reading of Animal Crossing, the game avoids moralistic lecturing and instead builds a model in which the player discovers the consequences for themselves.
Exposing ideology. Bogost describes games that reveal logics we follow without noticing. For decades, RPGs have treated “kill enemies, gain levels” as neutral. Undertale drags that assumption into view by reframing LV and EXP as records of violence. It is the mirror image of Bogost’s America’s Army example: that game’s Honor stat proceduralizes a value system the player is meant to accept, while Undertale uses its stats to make the player start to reconsider whether “killing enemies” should be a “neutral” thing.
The magic circle and metafiction. Games usually promise a safe space where reloading erases mistakes. Undertale deliberately leaks through that boundary: characters can notice reloads and remember past runs. The Flowey example for this: When you reload to undo a choice and get a better outcome, Flowey tells you “I know what you did.” That breaks the fourth wall: an action that should exist only outside the fiction becomes part of the narrative, and the character is speaking to you, the player, not just the child on screen.
What Message Does It Try to Convey, and Does It Succeed?
The message: violence is a choice, not a default, and empathy also takes efforts.
How it gets there: For example, Flowey earns my trust, then betrays it. The player becomes suspicious, then discovers the monsters aren’t actually bad. The bullet box turns into a way of expressing who each character is, which is what makes the game an empathy machine.
Did it succeed: yes, largely because the branching lets players choose for themselves. That ties to Bogost’s Take Back Illinois point that the player can accept or reject the argument. The one weakness is that repetitive encounters make the peaceful option tedious, I got bored after around 30 mins.
Takeways for my own games
My main takeaway is that the systems players already take for granted are some of the best material for surprise. Because players stop questioning a familiar system, playing with just one of its elements can create novelty and reversal without inventing new mechanics.
