UX ❤ Undertale
tl;dr play Undertale, if you haven’t already. Just do it.
A non-trivial slice of time has passed since Toby Fox released Undertale to well-deserved acclaim back in 2015, so I thought I’d reflect on my experiences with what had quickly become one of my favorite games ever. (Well, to be more precise, I thought I’d have reflected on them quite a while ago, but here we are.)
I’d like to analyze the almost universally beloved Undertale from a user (player, in this case) experience perspective, in which I will explore makes the game so great, objectively.
If you’ll humor me, we can consider games as being entirely about optimizing user/player experience to accomplish the dev’s/studio’s objective, whether it be to increase sales or frustrate the hell out of its players because that’s what it’s supposed to do. In the end, the product (surely after copious testing) that’s presented to the user/player can delight, frustrate, annoy, or make the player feel any number of emotions. A key difference in games is that frustration in getting to a goal is curiously baked into the process for a satisfying experience: a game that’s too easy may become boring, though a game that’s too difficult for too long can lead to quitting (“too long” meaning time between achieving rewards in some fashion, whether that is seeing progress via leveling or progressing to the next chapter/area of the game).
What contributes to Undertale’s success when viewed through this lens? Let’s answer this with heuristics!
Heuristics
Generally, UX heuristics are rules of thumb rooted in user research, often applied to software. In our case, they are non-definitive guidelines that “good” games will follow, developed from user testing and game literature. As with heuristics for general software, they won’t all apply in all cases, but they’re generally good standards to benchmark against. Here I’ll be referring to the Heuristic Evaluation for Playability (HEP) developed in 2004. (A newer version, Heuristics of Playability (PLAY), was published in 2009, but for RTS, action/adventure and FPS games, aka none of the genres Undertale falls into, and accordingly places less emphasis on story, a pivotal component of the Undertale experience. Also, from my cursory perusal of PLAY, many of the heuristics are essentially the same but reorganized into sections that make more sense and follow the categorization of well-known usability heuristics. As Undertale is a pretty simple and self-contained game, HEP should suffice for my purposes, though it’s not as comprehensive or well-categorized.)
HEP evaluates four categories critical to games: game play, story, mechanics, and usability. Even for its unconventional nature, Undertale does follow HEP for the most part and really excels in some areas.
Format
I’ll go through these four areas in turn with matched heuristics bolded. There will be some overlap between them as things come up logically, so I won’t go through the heuristics line by line to spare you from reading this for five years. Let’s start!
I. Game Play
The set of problems and challenges a user must face to win the game
Undertale asserts itself as “the RPG in which no one has to die”. You may then imagine that the game play is unique: to win a battle, the player can use actions other than attacking to assuage opponents’ hostility. Each enemy type, minor or not, has a different method of defeat, yet any enemy can still be fought normally. As a result, the extended and often humorous interaction with each enemy and character increases the player’s perceived familiarity with and fondness of the characters and the world they inhabit. For example, game play instructions for the simple controls given in the beginning are supplemented by comments from in-game dialogue with NPCs (frogs) that poke fun at the fact that they are giving you advice that’s incomprehensible to them in the game world.
Unity of game elements & setting
Although the world is unfamiliar to the player and each location is distinct, the game feels tied together with an overarching underground setting. This is due not only to the similar visuals of the locations but also the consistency of interactions and music.
The battle system can be regarded as easy to learn but hard to master, supplementing traditional RPG turn-based fighting with the ability to move around and dodge incoming attacks. While it may be a bit surprising at first, the system is easy to get used to but difficult because of the unpredictability of each monster’s attack patterns. There’s no sitting back during battles lest you deplete your low HP all the more quickly, yet they aren’t ridiculously long or difficult (mostly). As far as being penalized repetitively for the same failure… well, that’s just the nature of bullet hell type-games, really. Nonetheless, you can jump quickly back into the game, filled with determination from listening to “Determination”, the music that plays on the game over screen. These appropriately infuriating challenges are positive experiences in the end. They’re difficult enough that the player is kept engaged and may die numerous times, but they’re not impossible battles by any measure and they usually end at a reasonable point at which the player is satisfied and motivated to continue. The reward system is clever and a bit misleading, as experience points aren’t a given as they usually are; the player gains experience if he chooses to do so and gets gold for completing battles one way or another. For the player, reward also comes in the form of seeing humorous battle outcomes of spared enemies — scenarios that would not have happened had you killed them instead.
Ultimate consequences of actions remain obscured to the benefit of the narrative. While the player knows (or thinks she knows) the game’s objective and the end goal, the narrative contorts into startling shapes. However, because the player remains static in terms of abilities, skills and customization, players may become bored if they don’t find themselves interested in the story, the lack of shiny graphics or don’t care for the humor.
The game is player focused in a unique way. It’s clear that careful consideration has been put into the entire experience for the player by the granularity in which the game is personalized depending on what the player has done or chosen, which ensures a different experience for anyone playing. For example, there are many endings and many that would likely inspire a player to play through the game more than once. While people may play in ways that lead to the same endings, they will likely have different overall experiences with the game across plays. The varied endings certainly contribute to the great replay value, as players are likely to want to redo or finish parts they may have missed or fix the world that they may have somewhat decimated (cough). The game will give the player hints as to what he may want to accomplish next if there is still more to do to gain the “true” ending. This is an example of the brilliant way the game world reacts to the player and remembers their passage through it. Changes are persistent and even extend beyond the scope of the game: for example, returning to an earlier save file will trigger dialogue indicating that the characters in the game are aware of what the player has done. Similarly, special NPC events can be triggered by changing certain values in the game’s config file, giving the player some hidden pieces of dialogue to further the story. Scattered throughout the fan-written Undertale wiki are pages containing information where game/save data can be manipulated to make certain things happen or bypass restrictions, and the consequences of these manipulations are usually cheekily evident within the game afterwards.
The game also allows players to skip cut scenes that have been seen before, a common functionality but one that is implemented here with clever in-game dialogue from the main speaker in the cut scene.
II. Game Story
Plot and character development
Plot
The story is one of the main draws of the game, aside from all of the praise I’ve given on everything else in the game already. It seems simple enough at first glance: the protagonist, a human child, falls down into an underground of monsters and needs to return home. As you traverse through the world, however, you come across the lore — written in books, immortalized on wall signs, and eventually told by characters — progressively disclosed, going along with the sinister undercurrent of the game. In time, you learn that the character you are controlling is not even who you had thought it was from the start; questions continue to be raised and answered open-endedly; small details, such as the toy weaponry from Home, clarify themselves as the game progresses toward an end. Curious pieces of text (e.g. the mini-golf-esque activity in Snowdin Forest) become scrutinized as part of fan theory. It’s always fascinating and rather inspiring to see what and how much fans come up with — a testament to how engaging the clues are in the game that hint at certain ideas, almost like piecing together an easter egg in the form of a puzzle. The longer you play, the more you feel that although you have control over your character’s actions, you don’t truly know what is going on until the entire story is revealed at the end (and even then: is that it?).
Characters
For such a short game, Undertale does a phenomenal job of endearing the characters to the player, which it does through a couple of clever methods.
At its core (sorry), Undertale combines a small but richly developed world with universal themes that inherently appeal to pathos — good vs. evil, loyalty, innocence, the burden of choice. The player’s character, as a surrogate for the player — the androgyny especially allowing any player to easily insinuate themselves into the game — silently becomes integrated into the monsters’ world and actually has the greatest impact on their livelihood. Decisions the player makes influence the outcome of the game in a “reap what you sow” sort of attitude — the outcome, whatever it may be for a particular player, as there are quite a few — is at least fair: the player has plenty of forewarning in the game of what’s to come, though getting one ending over another or not getting the desired ending isn’t a terrible fate, as the player can restart and re-experience the game in a world that will respond slightly differently on subsequent visits.
Despite its many possible outcomes, the game consists of a singular vision, unequivocally expressed, quirky as it may be. A large part of this is thanks to one of the best cast of characters I’ve encountered in a game. No stone is left unturned (literally) — even random NPCs just standing around the town don’t simply utter banalities. It feels as though every character serves a purpose, one that is deliberate and meticulously and lovingly crafted.
This cohesion can especially be seen in the main characters. Since much of the game is dialogue, it’s no surprise that the characters have witty, charming dialogue that serves to get you through the game and reveal the intricacies of their relationships to each other. Another small but unique facet that ingrains itself into memory is that each character has a “voice” — a distinct pitch of fast-forwarding sound effect as their dialogue scrolls across the box that becomes associated with the character and subtly makes each character more memorable. Dialogue of the brothers, sans and Papyrus, also (unfortunately) take the letterforms of their respective typographic namesakes — with sans, of course, being the most comical character with his knee-slapper puns.
As you can probably guess from just this pair of skeletal brothers, the cast is eclectic and a bit nonsensical, lending humor to their interactions but also the warmth and camaraderie (generally) among a ragtag crew, one that the protagonist quickly melds into. The player spends time thinking about possible story outcomes because of the strong character development, something that is explicitly encouraged by the game, demonstrating its cleverly stateful implementation. And the player feels as though world is going on whether character is there or not, moreso than in many other games, as the idea is explicitly suggested by moments when characters interact with the player beyond the fourth wall, such as when Flowey says menacingly, “Well, I’ll let you mess around. I know you’ll come back eventually. And when that time comes… I’ll be waiting for you.”, acknowledging that the player will literally leave the game and return. And true to Flowey’s word, he does have context on your game play and will respond accordingly, a neat technical trick that impresses the player with all these meticulous details and makes the game world draw ever closer, blurring the lines between them.
Enemies are similarly varied and memorable, with each type having a personality that drives its attacks, reactions and method of defeat without fighting. The strangeness of the enemies seems to fit well in this potpourri collective and tend to endear rather than annoy, making random encounters (which aren’t obnoxiously numerous) fun instead of feeling like grinding as well as contributing to the unity of game elements.
III. Game Mechanics
Structure and logic that govern player interactions with the environment
As far as routine game mechanics, AI responses to user actions are consistent, with an engaging element of unpredictability when using non-combat actions. The battle system is simple but a rewarding experience with each battle, especially as random encounters are relatively sparse by design. Player and enemy health are always visible in battle and player stats can be viewed in battle and via the menu. Conventional controls are used in and outside of battle.
Aside from these, I’d like to specially call out the music, which is much more than “appropriate” music for a player’s given action.
Music
A nostalgic chiptune collection that warrants its own post, the music of Undertale befits the actions and places it graces — for example, the cavernous, moody melody of the waterfall matches its dank dimension, while the music of Snowdin Town is reminiscent of similar non-combat havens in other JRPGs. The music overall uses patterns akin to other games but tailors them to the best possible representation of each area, event or character in the game. One can only imagine how different the game would feel had been altered — it just fits, like sonic skin over the whole enterprise.
Some key tracks are variations or expansions of a central theme, “Memory”, a simple, sweet piano piece the player first encounters in the waterfall (incidentally, “Waterfall”, the eponymous theme of the place, sounds like “Memory” transposed in a minor key). It shows up in key songs during the final battle(s), notably in “Undertale”, the longest track and one that beautifully reimagines “Memory” with different instruments and arrangement.
True to other aspects of the game, it’s the small Easter egg-like details that really set it apart. Similar themes are used for related characters, strengthening their connection once the player is aware of it: “Ghost Fight” sounds like a slightly spookier version of “Dummy!”, both jazzy, punchy numbers that sound obviously similar, which makes sense when (if) the player finds out a bit of backstory of the characters.
IV. Game Usability
Interface, encompassing the elements with which a user interacts with the game (e.g. heads-up display (HUD), controller, peripherals)
To get some of the general things out of the way:
- Immediate feedback is provided for player actions (and really, you’d hope there wouldn’t be lag with such state of the art graphics…).
- Save states are appropriately frequent and in places you’d expect (e.g. towns; right before major battles).
- The UI is consistent, though there are typographical and color changes sometimes, as aforementioned, though these are clearly deliberate and meant to differentiate characters.
- The player has enough information to get started initially, going through a little tutorial that Toriel generously provides. Pretty standard learn-by-doing onboarding experience, giving a great introduction to the strange world and monsters the player will encounter.
Interface Elements
First: a brief intro to diegesis theory, which ties in with the game UI components. With roots in literary and film theory, diegesis refers to the world in which a story is set, and includes the concepts of “narrative” and the “fourth wall”. A narrative is the story the designer wishes to convey and that game characters are aware of. Not everything is part of the narrative: for example, the game menu is something that the player is aware of but the character is not, like an uninteresting version of dramatic irony in literature. The fourth wall is the imagined barrier between the game and the player. If the player feels fully immersed in the game, they will have transcended the fourth wall.
Given this framework, any UI component can be classified along the axes of narrative and fourth wall, with four quadrants:
- Diegetic: In the game narrative and game world (e.g. the Pip Boy in Fallout 4, which the player uses for reference (navigation, inventory, etc.) and the character pulls up every time on his wrist)
- Non-diegetic: Neither in the game narrative nor in the game world (e.g. action menu in combat)
- Meta: In the game narrative but not in the game world (e.g. blood splatter on the character’s field of vision — acknowledges the fourth wall with nothing about the game space changing)
- Spatial: In the game world but not in the game narrative (e.g. on-screen visuals giving information in battles; these are in the game space but not part of the narrative)
The game UI is largely diegetic with a mostly non-diegetic menu: most of the interface is within both the narrative and the world the game takes place in, which contributes to the immaculate, immersive experience that is a large part of the game’s charm. The menu itself, simple and contained within a quite reasonable number of layers, reminds the player of the old school RPGs from which Undertale has unabashedly drawn influence. There also isn’t too much to display in the dialogue box during battle, so it isn’t very complicated.
I say that the menu is only mostly non-diegetic because there are certain battles in which the action buttons disappear or are inaccessible, cleverly breaking the fourth wall and making it a part of the narrative, since the choices that you’re supposed to have, that drive the action, are temporarily removed by the boss.
It’s also pretty common for minibosses/enemies to change the boundaries by which you’re apparently limited. In this way, while you yourself have your choices, the enemy also has control over the battle by interacting with the elements that are expected to be strictly diegetic. The surprise of frequent fourth-wall breaking levels the playing field a bit for the enemy and adds a level of interest in the game characters. This playful teasing of the traditional JRPG format adds to the game’s intrigue, imbuing old mechanics with refreshing twists that make the game all the more endearing and memorable.
The only minor drawback with any of the interaction is that there are no affordances to assist with memorability during combat: I admit that in my first play through, I started off attacking because it was the first navigation element (naturally) and once I’d gone into the attack options I wasn’t sure how to return to the main menu. I’ve heard similar anecdotes from friends I’ve coerced into playing the game, one who’d nearly died from attacking when she’d meant to use an item to heal (not me in third person, I swear).
If there had been an indication of controls tucked discreetly into a corner of context menus, scenarios like this would likely happen less.
For example, in this battle with Vulkin, a cuddly volcano-like enemy who just wants to heal you with its lava:
As there’s plenty of space left in the dialogue box, a small note on controls (even just specifying the Back key) would be helpful and unobtrusive. However, as is usual with these games, the menu is small enough that this is certainly not really an issue — it’s more of a tiny nitpick for a solid, no-frills menu.
The act of breaking the fourth wall, instead of being a cute distraction, provokes you into thinking more deeply about your actions and makes the universe feel more real, heightening emotional involvement in an experience that feels personal without being maudlin.
Clocking in at a total of 18 hours after my third playthrough over one weekend, I can say unequivocally that playing Undertale has been one of my best game experiences, and I hope you’ll give it a try and get hooked as well (now that I’ve spoiled some things, right?) or play it again — hopefully without malicious intent…
