Critical Play: Puzzles in Undertale
I’m doing something a bit unconventional with this critical play, but mostly because I wanted to look at a game that contains puzzles that aren’t the main game mechanic, since the game I am currently working on with my team similarly does not center puzzles, and rather focuses on narrative and dialogue primarily.
Undertale as a game in general is actually a great example of only ever using mechanics to contribute to the richness of the narrative and emotional experience of a game. In fact, one of my main takeaways from playing the game critically and generally something I always strive for in my game design is to always make sure that the main mechanic and the story are one in the same. In the case of Undertale, the act of sparing shows the player that kindness and generosity can still be a path to victory, even in a setup which we are programmed by our game biases to believe should be won by conquest. Conversely, the act of killing as we are trained leads to grief, destruction, and chaos as you progress. Undertale is all about leaning into the tropes of RPG games and subverting the player’s expectations at just the right moments for humor or strong emotional impact.
Puzzles appear in multiple places in Undertale. The most classic example is various tasks that are required to advance to the next area. While it’s not the most inventive use of the puzzle as a mechanic, it helps the player lean into their biases in RPG style games in the same way that other mechanics such as “speech” sounds for every letter spoken by characters and a turn based battle system do.
The other more obvious example of puzzles are those set up by the character Papyrus, in order to “capture” the human player, which invokes classic RPG tropes of pointless puzzles detached from story, but uses it for humor by making the puzzles unexpectedly easy. This also helps show that Papyrus is actually just a nice person still and would much rather capture the human with puzzles rather than face them head-on in combat, which helps play into the moral dilemma presented to the player to kill or spare Papyrus.
