A short, exceptional indie
Undertale, the RPG that watches how you play
- Critic score
- 92
- Player rating
- 4.7/5
- Main story
- 7 h
- Genre
- RPG
Seven hours to finish, deliberately crude visuals, and one of the highest indie scores in the catalog. Undertale really does not resemble anything else, and that is not marketing copy.
The premise fits in two lines. Humans and monsters went to war; the humans won and sealed the monsters underground. Long afterwards, a child falls into Mount Ebott and has to climb back out. You are that child.
Undertale borrows the furniture of the classic RPG — exploration, encounters, experience points — and then subverts its core. Fights play out as bullet-hell minigames where you dodge incoming attacks inside a small box. More importantly, every encounter offers an alternative: strike, or spare. Talk, flatter, flee, work out what the creature in front of you actually wants.
That choice is not decorative. The game remembers what you did. Monsters react, characters behave differently, and the story diverges depending on whether you crossed the world killing everything or killing no one. Some encounters become radically different — sometimes far harder — precisely because you decided to spare.
It is the work of one person, Toby Fox, who wrote the script, the code and the music. That soundtrack became famous in its own right, and a good share of the game's reputation rests on how it carries each character.
Seven hours is short, and it is deliberate: Undertale never pads itself. If you want a game you can finish in a weekend and will still be talking about in six months, the catalog offers little better.