Game Title: Undertale
Platform: Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux
Genre: 2D role-playing
Developer: Toby Fox
Game Writer/Creative Director/Narrative Designer: Toby Fox
Undertale is a role-playing game with a simple background: a long time ago, Humans and Monsters had a war. After the Humans win, they send the Monsters underground. Many years later, one human came to climb a mountain that no one had ever come back from. As a result, the human fell into the underground and needed to find a way out.
The game has three different Route; Neutral Route (the player kills at least one but not all the monsters), Genocide Route (the player kills all the monsters in the game), and True Pacifist Route (the play doesn’t kill any monster, a Neutral Route has been completed and a Genocide Route has not been completed). Each Route has its own storyline. Though these stories are independent, these three endings can be combined into a complete world outlook.
I want to point out Sans. He is one of the only two characters that use typefaces as their names and have different typefaces in the dialogues. However, he is more unique than this. Developer plants many seeds on him. Sans knows the player has the power of SAVE. He knows how much EXP the player gains. He has the ability to teleport. All these facts make Sans a mysterious character. His presence makes the player want to keep playing the game and even play more than once to discover the truth.
The most decisive Element of Undertale is the relation between the three storylines. On the one hand, unlike other multiple-ending games whose endings are independent, Undertale’s endings support each other. Only when the player finishes all the Routes, they can get the final, true story of the Underground. Each end is still a single story though it will leave some clues about the truth. On the other hand, the endings can influence each other. This is unusual for a game but is very reasonable in reality. Once the player finishes the Genocide Route and awakes Chara, they cannot reach the True Pacifist Route because Chara has already been awake and will keep trying to destroy the human world. This point makes the game close to the real world and distinguishes Undertale from other multiple-ending role-playing games.
One key element showing up from the game is that the monsters’ said that although the monsters may have muscular bodies, their souls are weak and easily broken; however, the Human has “Determination” in their heart, so the main character can use the SAVE function in the game to restart everything.
Fox said he had no intended target audience for this game, just gamers. This may explain the non-binary nature of the player character, an androgynous figure who can be named at the player’s discretion. According to the Undertale Wikia site, naming your character certain monikers will trigger custom responses from the game and, in one case, even raise the difficulty level. One interesting fact is that Undertale has a unique community, although it is a short indie game. The game creat a public with the world it builds. Although the game ended with the “Determination” mentioned in the game, all the players tried to continue the story outside of the game.