Critic.co.nz

Undertale, an indie single player role-playing game (RPG) created by Toby Fox, celebrated its 10 year anniversary on Sept. 15 and is still ranking high in popularity. The game is set in the Underground, which the player (a human) falls into after venturing up a mountain. Monsters and Humans both used to live on the surface, but after their war, humans sealed the monsters away.
The player’s objective is to escape back to the surface; however, they must first journey through the entire Underground and face the king, Asgore, in battle. Here is where the game diverges into multiple different endings, or routes, with the main three known as Pacifist, Genocide, and Neutral — with Neutral having 90 variations of endscreen dialogue depending on actions the player takes.
The many endings are one reason why Undertale has sustained popularity after 10 years. The replayability value is high because there is dialogue for almost any scenario and objects have their own dialogue when players interact with them. For even more variety, the game has a built-in system known as the fun value, which is a randomly generated number from one to 100 that is determined upon starting a new game.
Some values are especially rare and may never occur even after replaying the game multiple times, but others are more common. Fun value events range from a wrong number phone call to meeting a non-playable character (NPC) that is otherwise absent. The events are small and do not affect the main story in a significant way, but they are a fun piece of extra content if one is lucky enough to encounter them.
Speaking of rare encounters, glitches are not frequent in Undertale unless they are specifically sought out. The infamous punch card — an item obtained from an ice cream seller — is used by speedrunners to skip cut-scenes. It is also possible to clip out of bounds in multiple areas, if one is determined to do so.
But no discussion of Undertale is complete without mentioning the soundtrack. It perfectly creates the mood, whether it be in a battle, character introduction, cut-scene, town, or shop. It captures the range of sentimentality, panic, guilt, and goofiness that are quintessential to Undertale’s storytelling. “MEGALOVANIA,” the song that plays during the Genocide Route final boss, even has a dedicated Wikipedia page.
The music more than compensates for the graphics. Not to say that they are sub-par, however, many current games pride themselves on ultra-realistic graphics. Undertale is entirely pixel art and disproves the idea that a game needs to have good graphics to tell a memorable story.
Undertale, deserving of five out of five stars, is one of the best indie games and has yet to be dethroned of that epithet after 10 years. It can be played on Steam, Xbox, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, and Playstation 4 and 5.