Undertale’s Punishing “Genocide” Run Is What We Deserve
Let me get two things out of the way up front: First, I love Undertale. It’s probably one of my favorite game experiences ever. And second, this essay includes some major spoilers for Undertale. So I’m telling you, begging you even, if there’s even a tiny, remote chance that you’ll play Undertale and you haven’t already, don’t read this essay. Without having played the game, this essay will do the simultaneously terrible things of making very little sense and yet still spoiling major elements of what make the game’s twists and turns so thrilling.
So, we’ve got that out of the way. Everyone left has either played the game or is 1000% sure that they never will. Okay? You sure?
Good. Let’s get into it.
This essay was inspired by a simple comment on a Reddit post about Undertale, and it was a complaint that the insane level of difficulty of the Undyne and Sans battles in the Genocide route seems to come out of nowhere and made no sense. And I thought “well, I didn’t think so at the time, but why?” So, I sat down and thought about why it made sense and how I could articulate that.
First, I think one of the key things to understand about Undertale is that the three “routes” through the game don’t just reflect narrative choices; they’re about gamer play styles. The game reinforces this through its fourth-wall-breaking narrative, especially in the Genocide route. Heck, there’s a whole speech about it, including the line “I bet someone like that’s watching right now, aren’t they…?” (That line has made many streamers question if the game somehow knew that they were streaming their playthrough. Unfortunately, that line appears in the game regardless. But it’s pretty effective, right?) The point is that when Chara and Flowey talk about what it’s like to have the power to “save” and “load,” they’re really talking about the types of gamers who will, for instance, quicksave in Skyrim, slaughter an entire town of people to see what happens, and then load their quicksave and continue as if nothing had happened.
Most people are encouraged to tackle the genocide route last, as doing so will at least mitigate the ridiculous difficulty, and it will fill in some story gaps from the other two playthroughs. The other major reason to do it, though, is that it implicitly reframes the other two “routes” of the game as being about play style and not just about getting the “right” ending.
Think about it this way: The neutral route is just a casual playthrough; the pacifist route is just like a pacifist run in any other game; and the genocide route is the completionist route.
Okay, let’s get into those difficulty spikes, as promised.
Let me get this out of the way: According to the traditional rules of game design, the difficulty of the Undyne battle is ridiculous, unfair, and… just wrong. And the Sans battle is about fifty times that.
But games have changed since game designers started deconstructing difficulty curves and studying “flow.” Breaking the fourth wall isn’t just about cheap tricks like Eternal Darkness pretending to lose your saved game, or the Genesis X-Men game requiring you to actually restart the console to beat the level (and, by the way, that was just taking it too far!).
Games are mature enough as a medium that breaking the fourth wall can include making the player really think about their relationship with the game, and with gaming in general. BioShock’s “a man chooses, a slave obeys,” scene, which removes agency from the player just when they would want it the most, is obviously the most famous example of this. (As a side note, I think Night In The Woods does a subtle version of this by frequently giving the player only dialog options that exacerbate conflicts with friends and family, which is in my opinion an incredibly powerful narrative device… and probably worth its own essay.)
Of course, Undertale breaks the fourth wall in a much more obvious way in the ‘Photoshop Flowey’ battle, so the player is ready for more of those shenanigans in the other playthroughs. But… they never come.
What does come, in the Genocide run, is not so much a fourth wall break as it is a very slow, deliberate fourth wall dissolve. Because the game “knows” how much effort you’re going to put into killing every single monster in the entire game, it starts changing in a way that constantly reminds you that it knows what you’re doing: The time between random encounters increases, there are placeholder random encounters with an empty screen (because there are no enemies left to kill), the music slows down or is replaced with an ominous drone, towns are deserted, characters are gone or beg for mercy, and the narration uses “you” in a way that seems to point more towards the player than the player character.
All of these decisions turn the game from a quirky RPG with fun characters and silly jokes into one of the darkest games I’ve ever experienced, and the contrast between this version of the game and the one the player (presumably) experienced before is about as jarring as possible. What I’m getting at is that all these changes draw attention to themselves. Much like BioShock’s big (previously mentioned) moment, Undertale does things that make you question the game from your personal perspective and ask questions that you wouldn’t normally ask: Why am I doing this? Should I keep doing this? Is this even fun? Am I still the hero of the story?
For example: Once I got to the Waterfall sequence and the Monster Kid started appearing every so often, I got a sick feeling in my stomach: “Oh shit… I’m going to have to kill this kid.”
And I would argue that the suspense around this, the question of whether or not the game is going to put the player in a position of watching their character murder a goofy, naive, innocent child, just so they can try to see the final ending of the game, is one of the most impactful tricks the game plays on us. And then, when you finally get the chance, just at the moment that you fear that the answer is yes, this kid is going to have to die, Undyne steps in.
Then, a key question the game has forced you to ask yourself, “Am I even the hero of the story?” is answered. And the answer is, no, you’re not. Undyne is.
At this point, the game makes it abundantly clear: In the story where there’s a peaceful society that has been invaded by a terrible monster that kills everything in its path, and the monster is ultimately defeated by a strong, brave, selfless hero, you are now the monster and Undyne is now the hero. This is flipping the trope, the basic outline of nearly every single-player RPG story, on its head. She’s strong, she’s dedicated, she’s got badass armor and a magic spear, why wouldn’t she be the hero? And you, you’re a demon child who gains power by murdering innocent people, of course you’re the bad guy!
In that context, of course Undyne’s fight is going to be insanely difficult; Undyne is the RPG protagonist and you’re not!
If you compare this version of Undyne to the one you encounter in the other versions of the game, she’s a typical RPG guard boss battle: She’s big and powerful, but she’s just doing her job — this is just another day at the office.
There’s also a great bit of lore consistency in the Genocide Undyne battle too: Because she has a much more important motivation for defeating Chara, she also has determination, which is established as the intangible quality that gives the player their power as well. At the end of the pacifist run, in the True Lab, we learn that monsters can only handle a certain amount of Determination before they melt into mush. Normally, when monsters die, they disintegrate, but in Undyne’s last moments, she starts to melt instead; this shows clearly (though it’s easy to miss) that Undyne mustered up far more Determination than monsters normally have, and that’s what allowed her to be powerful enough to at least give Chara a run for their money.
Now, let’s talk about Sans.
Of course, there’s an in-universe explanation as to why Sans is so powerful, and that’s that, well, he was that powerful and self-aware all along. There were hints of this in the other playthroughs — he’s the only character who ever winks at the player (literally, towards the screen), he sometimes appears to be in two places at once by being on opposite ends of the same long rooms, and then there’s the chilling “You’d be dead where you stand,” line from the conversation in the restaurant. He talks about monitoring the timespace continuum and says, “Look, I gave up trying to go back a long time ago.” And every time you lose and come back for more, he mocks you for it.
In this story, and this is a minor spoiler for the Doctor Strange movie, you’re Dormammu and Sans is Doctor Strange, fully aware that he might not be able to beat you, but he can certainly make things really really tedious until you give up. Think of it this way: He’s not testing the determination of the player character. He’s testing the determination level of you, the player.
Now, remember that last question I said Undertale was making us ask ourselves, “Is this even fun?”
Sans is the game challenging us, asking the other questions about why we would do this, and forcing us to answer them explicitly as… “because I want to see what happens.” Because if the game isn’t fun anymore, which it arguably isn’t after the twentieth time Sans has kicked your ass, then why continue? We play games to have fun, right? Or… is that all? Sometimes we play games because we really just want to see what we can get away with, to dig up every last nook and cranny of story and content, to get our money’s worth.
If the Sans fight wasn’t punishingly difficult, then reaching the end and reading Chara’s final speech would just be another narrative bullet point — the player reaches the end, the bad guy gives a big speech, the game ends, that’s it.
But that’s not what happens. By the time Chara emerges and explains everything, the player has been slaving away at the same boss battle for possibly hours. So they’re primed and ready for a major revelation… and then they get a speech about how increasing attribute numbers is what Chara lives for. And, having just put all that effort into the Sans battle, the natural reaction to that is “What? I went through all that to increase my exp… just for the sake of making a number higher?”
And then Chara says, and I’m paraphrasing, now that we’ve reached the end of that, there’s nothing left to do. So let’s erase this world and move on to the next.
Anyone who played through, and enjoyed, the pacifist route of the game knows that in order to enjoy the game, you don’t have to increase your exp. You don’t need those numbers to enjoy the game at all. Chara’s perspective is, to use a really strong word, a perversion of why we play games. To reduce everything to numbers, to get 100% of everything in a game just for the sake of it, drains games of their meaning and saps the fun out of them. It invalidates the reasons that we enjoy Undertale, or any game for that matter.
And yet… here we are. We just did exactly that. We just slaughtered hundreds of innocent monsters, tried to kill a kid, spent hours trying to beat Sans… for what? To say that we did? What purpose does that serve?
The Sans battle serves a unique purpose, and that’s to make us frustrated. And that frustration can either make us turn the game off and give up, or it can make us want to soldier on because we’re absolutely sure that there must be a huge reward at the end if the battle is this hard. Undertale then asks us, what if it’s not worth it? What if this was all just an exercise? Why would you still want to play a game that did this to you? What’s the point?
Many games that leverage frustration as a motivation for overcoming a challenge in and of itself do so with the implicit message that overcoming the challenge will be worth it in some way — the player is rewarded with more story, better titles or ranks, more collectibles, more achievements, etc. Games have conditioned players to assume that any beatable challenge a game presents is there to be conquered. Undertale’s Genocide run points out that any action the developer has planned for the player to do obviously has to be accounted for in a logical way, but follows that up with… so what? What if the developer presents a challenge that is punishingly difficult and then doesn’t reward the player proportionally? Someone who read an early version of this essay pointed out that one of the “rewards” for finishing the Genocide run is that the game permanently ‘taints’ the player’s Save file so that subsequent completions of the Pacifist Ending (which should be the “best” ending) will be marred by the game’s explicit acknowledgement that you, the player, did actually murder all of these now-happy characters in another timeline! This knowledge, that you could and did do the deed, is something the game will not allow you to forget. And by doing that, perhaps you’ll ask yourself, “Why did I feel the need to get 100% in this game? Was this worth it?”
Finally, by making Saving and Loading part of the game’s internal canon and by supporting several distinct play styles, Undertale is able to address these issues in a more direct way than most games could. For example, Spec Ops: The Line famously questions the player’s enjoyment of the game in the Loading screens after the player character has caused the deaths of countless civilians, but the point rings somewhat hollow given the nature of the game as an almost completely linear experience; if the player doesn’t murder the civilians, the story doesn’t continue. Undertale makes sure to give you a choice at every turn of the Genocide run, and will actually cancel out of it and return you to the Neutral path if you spare the life of even a single monster. That the game gives the player so much agency makes its commentary far more poignant.
Undertale has so much to say about games and players and fandom and our motivations that, honestly, it’s hard for me to imagine where else there is to go. As a game developer, I love the idea of pushing the boundaries of narrative, and I especially love a good creative fourth wall break. Undertale might be a once-in-a-generation achievement in this respect; we’ll see.
As a companion to this essay, I recommend HBomberguy’s video “Perverted Sentimentality: An Analysis of UNDERTALE,” which addresses some of the game’s commentary about player choice from a different angle.
Thanks to Glen Henry for some good feedback about the conclusion of this essay.
