At this point it’s unlikely that Toby Fox’s Undertale or his latest project, Deltarune require much in the way of introduction. Since Undertale’s release in 2015, it has become one of the single most financially successful indie games ever made, and Earthbound-inspired indie games similar to it have become a staple of the modern gaming space. From Lisa The Painful to Omori, unconventional approaches to the JRPG format have received critical and popular acclaim for good reason. Undertale was rightly praised upon release for its decision to encourage an entirely non-violent playstyle, but the idea of subverting traditionally violent game mechanics has been attempted by other developers for some time now (notable AAA efforts include Spec Ops: The Line’s Red Phosphorus Scene and Modern Warfare 2’s infamous No Russian mission).

Undertale’s particular approach to changing the formula was to take classic turn-based RPG combat and replace attack types with actions that would influence the emotional state of enemies. Instead of a fireball, you flirt. Instead of choosing between a slashing or piercing attack to hit an enemy’s weak point, you have to assess whether they would prefer a hug or a respectful acknowledgement of their physical boundaries to pacify them. What resulted from this shift were combat encounters that felt quite familiar to players, but from a perspective that gave those encounters new meaning. A grass enemy being weak to fire doesn’t tell much of a story, but pretending to laugh at an enemy’s bad jokes to boost their self-esteem so they stop fighting builds a full narrative arc out of the same core gameplay loop. Undertale may give players the option of killing or sparing enemies in every encounter, but all the complexities of combat have been shifted away from the ATTACK button and into the ACT button. However, this article doesn’t exist just to sing Undertale’s praises. On the contrary, while this new approach to storytelling is compelling, it also creates a new set of problems that become especially noticeable in Undertale’s narrative choices outside of combat.

In Undertale, you are given a branching tree of gameplay possibilities. Every player starts from exactly the same place but may end up somewhere entirely different in their ending depending on a litany of factors. These factors are: how many monsters you killed, what end-game decisions you made, which characters' side stories you completed, and which secrets you found. The amount that a player conforms to either a purely violent or purely pacifist playthrough, decides where they fall on a spectrum of outcomes that each provide slightly different dialogue, and subtly different ending content as well. While this sounds great on paper, the problem with this system is that while it appears to give the player a pretty wide array of choices, it actually ends up being highly restrictive because all of these middle endings between the pure Pacifist and Genocide runs aren’t anywhere near as fleshed out or satisfying. If anything, they are more like easter eggs for completionists who want to see every scrap of dialogue the game can offer. For most players, these middle endings don’t actually provide a satisfying experience, and players are aware of this. Assuming one isn’t going into the game blind, most people playing Undertale will complete a Pacifist run first with a guide, and then those who want more will play a Genocide run afterwards. Given how tedious Genocide runs are, requiring excessive amounts of grinding to progress, the run itself mostly exists to showcase challenging boss fights and bonus story content. This creates a situation where you can get many different endings and make a variety of choices, but players aren’t making those choices because they know that sticking to one end of the game’s moral binary will give them a better experience. This problem is compounded by how obvious Undertale’s binary story choices are. 

In combat, you are given two outcomes to choose from: kill or spare, and Undertale’s dialogue and story choices are almost identical in their moral scope. You can forgive someone for being evil, or not. You can be kind of a jerk, or not. At almost every turn, you are left with a clearly good option and a clearly bad one. When you are playing to be good, bad options are basically just completionist fodder that you’ll see in an easter egg compilation and nothing more. Making purely good or purely bad choices is simply the method of play most encouraged by the game’s design. Choosing a mixture of good and bad options in a playthrough compromises the player’s fun, and so they don’t. 

This is where Deltarune comes in. With Deltarune, Toby Fox takes the same idea as Undertale, making a game about pacifism, but completely changes what choice actually means. Instead of having a story with many branching paths, no matter what the player does, Deltarune starts and ends at the exact same place. Your choices, in a grander sense, mean nothing. With that sacrifice, Toby Fox opens the door for better choices and more interesting player decisions through gameplay. Since no matter what you do, the outcome is the same, no answer is wrong. Now that the player doesn’t get to have a ‘correct’ answer, they actually have the freedom to make a choice, own it, and move on without feeling the need to consult a wiki to get the endings the developer put the most time and effort into. Those of you who have played Deltarune’s most recent chapter may be wondering how this argument works when the game actually does have a secret ‘evil’ ending. The difference is that getting this bad ending requires the player to complete tasks so off the beaten path that they don’t overlap with a regular playthrough much at all. A player can’t end up on this story route without making an active effort to do so, and so it does not compromise the freedom of choice within a regular playthrough. You cannot fail at playing the game’s primary route by choosing any particular combat or dialogue option.

One of the most entertaining ways that this new freedom manifests itself is in Deltarune’s combat. Players still use attacks and actions to take down enemies, but now choosing violence does not actually kill any opponents. Enemies just run away like anyone would if they were being pummeled by a silent blue human and a goth purple dragon girl. Deltarune is still about non-violence, so even if you choose to attack, you are not forced into a moral binary. The game lets you make the choices you want, and leaves it at that. The best part is that now, combining attacks and actions is actually the most advantageous playstyle. You can tire out enemies with attacks to make them susceptible to sleep spells, or drop an enemy’s guard with an action to add additional impact to an attack. That’s not a style of play Undertale could accommodate because it functioned in a binary way. Attacking an enemy once doesn’t do anything. Attacking is only useful if you follow through and kill the enemy. It’s the same with ACT and SPARE commands, they only matter if you follow through with them completely. 

The variety of options in regular combat and in story moments was such a breath of fresh air. After such a runaway success, Toby Fox did not need to change anything. If a sequel to Undertale or spinoff was made with nearly identical combat, the experience would be more than enough for most people. The choice to make such a radical departure from Undertale’s gameplay is exactly why Toby Fox’s games are as beloved as they are. With so much of Deltarune still in development, it’s impossible to know how the game might change for better or worse, but what we have now is something truly exciting. Given Toby Fox’s track record, I would say we can expect even more excellent developments from here.