Undertale vs. Deltarune: the duality of Toby Fox and indie games

Undertale, an indie game made by Toby Fox, was released in 2015, and quickly skyrocketed from an obscure game into a staple of internet culture. This game, though criticized by some for it’s rudamentary graphics and lackluster story, actually has a deeper plot behind the veil of such a simple game.

In the similar vein of such games like Doki Doki Literature Club, Undertale brings a new meaning of “meta” to the table. Early on, you learn the mechanics of the game and the different actions you can take: you can choose to be a pacifist, using your actions to placate the monsters you encounter and leave them unharmed; you can pick and choose who you kill and who you spare, leading to different ending with different characters; or you can choose to completely wipe out the entire underground, slaughtering every monster in your path until there are none left.

This game gives you a clear precedent: your choices matter. Who you kill and who you spare affects how the game continues and how other characters interact with you. Kill  certain characters, and you get different dialogue. A clear example is if you choose to kill off one of the more popular characters of the game, a skeleton named Papyrus. His dream is to be a royal guard, and to achieve his dream, he tries to capture you. If you choose to kill him, his brother then begins to show a clear contempt for you, as well as the captain of the royal guard, Undyne, who specifically asks you “Papyrus… what did you do to him?” However, if you spare him along with everyone else, he leaves the underground with his friends and brother, and in the end credits you can see him driving a fancy car down a highway.

Deltarune, however, is almost completely different from the first game Toby made. Yes, there are returning characters, and the art style is similar, but other than that, the story is far from what most were expecting when Toby dropped the game on Halloween after a few ominous tweets. You create your human, only to have it all erased with the message “we can’t choose who we are in this world.” You play as Kris, a silent human who goes to school and has to deal with the formidable bully of the class, Suzy. You are both sent to a dark world, and after meeting the kind prince Ralsei, you embark on a journey to bring peace to the land and bring yourself home. What options you choose do very little to do with the game as a whole: you can choose to fight everyone, only to have them run away before you kill them, or spare them, leading to a slightly more peaceful ending. The message is clear: your choices do not matter anymore.

I find it fascinating how one man can create two vastly different games. His first game was a huge success and brought about a new era to the indie gaming industry. Many were anxious to see what his next project would be, hoping it would live up to the legend that was his first game. I can only imagine how stressful it would be to have the entire world watching you, waiting for your next “big thing,” unknowing on how your next idea will be delivered. He confessed during a series of tweets that he didn’t know whether or not he would ever finish Deltarune in his lifetime, because he had so many ideas and mechanics he wanted to put into the next installments of the game.

This duality is something that many creators experience: burnout. We are pushed to create, build off of past successes, but what if we don’t want to be known for what we’ve done in our past? What if we have new ideas, but we don’t know how they’ll be taken, because it’s different from our known content? We don’t know until we try it, and that’s a scary thing. So we keep chugging out sequel after sequel, using the same ideas over and over until they become old and stale. It leads to a society that doesn’t know what original content truly looks like because everything is just a copy of everything else. We need to learn to push past this fear of failure, embrace new ideas, and accept that not everything is black and white all the time. And that’s okay. We choose to keep looking forward, to new ideas, and that is truly art.

Sometimes new content is as simple as making an anagram of a title you already used, turning it into something new.

Author: Caroline Nations

I used to be Caroline Nations. If this is who you're looking for, I'm sorry. I'm Kai now. Seventeen, young and sweet, MSA student, and I'm not throwing away my shot.

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