Team Hatoful presents the Undertale Demo - Part 4

[davidn]

It's the final part of the Undertale demo! In this, we realize what we now have to do, and head to the final confrontation, which I attempt to resolve in the most peaceful manner possible

Comments

[dr_dos]

It's simply amazing to me, how in just an hour this game establishes itself as something so special.

I can probably count the number of games where I've felt real emotions towards the characters on one hand, and then this demo takes itself to that level so passionately, and so immediately.

The other games that have made me feel for the characters have always been me reacting to something that happens, PMD2's ending sequence, the reveals of various Phoenix Wright final cases, the various sacrifices in Cave Story.

But then, this is first where the the tragedy is your own conscious doing. I think everybody who plays through this finds themselves refusing to fight Toriel, and then in desperation whittling her down hoping she'll accept mercy at low health.

(In my first playthrough my final hit on her had the attack bar dead center and I thought that was some instant one hit KO for timing it right)

It's weird how games have been capable of this for a good 30+ years, but so few come remotely close to offering anything this game does. 30 years and it's extraordianrily unique to have a game where you have enemies and the solution to them isn't punching or shooting them until they stop moving is virtually nil.

I had heard a decent number of things about this game in bits and pieces beforehand. (And you totally missed out by not calling her Mom on the phone and then flirting with her afterwards.) I planned to just wait for the full release because why get excited for a game that's god knows how far off? Then another friend was upset he couldn't get somebody to play it and so I made sure to when he asked me to as well, and good lord. It's funny to think how it's all just a demo because it stands better on its own right now than most games ever do.

Since you haven't yet, be sure to plug the Kickstarter! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1002143342/undertale

[davidn]

It really does grasp your heart very early on - I can't name a game that's had such a prominent... mother figure in it, who teaches you empathy instead of strength and literally holds your hand through the first puzzle, making you form a real attachment to her from the moment she appears... and then blaming you for her death! It seems like that cruel trap happens to everyone...

[kjorteo]

I totally meant to plug the Bandcamp page when we were recording this, but I forgot. See, this was recorded back before there was a Kickstarter and there was an FAQ on the official Tumblr more or less saying "yeah I don't have anything like that but if you want to throw money at the project buy the soundtrack, I guess."

and just like the Flowey thing I hinted at above, I have SO MUCH I want to say about Toriel in response to all that but I should probably wait for the good ending (well more making David get all the relevant-to-her-character dialogue we missed along the way on the first playthrough, but either way.)

One thing I can say now, though: the game brilliantly handles the player's sense of trust. It starts you out with Your Best Friend, Flowey, who turns out to be ... well. Then Toriel comes along, and the player isn't sure whether to trust her because the player is probably a bit rattled by the last trust exercise from, what, ten seconds ago. Toriel keeps the player tentative throughout the entire game--she is kind and loving, reassuring, sweet, and instantly empathetic, but if the player thinks about it hard enough there are some hints that something may not be 100% there with her.

She is really mothering. Really, really mothering. The first three puzzles in the game are almost insultingly easy to anyone who has ever played a video game before, but rather than even giving you the slightest chance, she automatically solves two of them for you and vandalizes the one in between them with big giant "PRESS THIS ONE" arrows and circles. She gets you all worked up that she's asking some horrifically scary test of independence, and then that turns out to be nothing more than "walk from one side of this long empty hallway to the other." (There aren't even any encounters there.) The player is clearly meant to be somewhere between "goatmom is the best <3" and "um, you know, I can probably handle this, you don't have to... sigh."

Then you get to her home and it's the warmest sweetest location in the game, but the suspicion that there's another shoe to be dropped intensifies; she won't let you into her mysterious creepy basement, and she won't let you leave. Clearly something isn't right ... right?

It's only in hindsight, after you can finally stop wondering "is Toriel going to turn evil" and look back on everything that happened now that you no the answer is "no," that she really was as genuinely compassionate as she appeared the entire time, and everything she did really was for you, and you were suspicious of a kindly old goatmom who was completely innocent the entire time. And then you killed her, maybe, if you didn't get the good ending anyway

We didn't do this, but when I played on my own, rather than immediately walk through the door and run into Flowey again, I first walked back into the house, and just ... took in everything. The bedroom she had prepared just for me. The bookshelves that were her only entertainment before I arrived. The pie. And I felt bad not only for killing her, but for ever having doubted her. :(

[davidn]

I don't think I adequately conveyed how much Flowey scared the life out of me when he transformed - I thought I was in a tutorial, I wasn't really paying much attention, and then suddenly... that evil face and the shaking text... my hand had reflexively gone to Alt+F4, which fortunately/unfortunately did nothing! Just after that, I was pretty uneasy about... not Toriel specifically, but really anything that this game was going to do - especially in that long walk with the appropriately-named scary music playing.

Toriel definitely isn't evil, but I wonder how innocent you could truly call her... she honestly believes that keeping the human in her home is the best for her, not even considering that she might want to go back to her real home, but she knows from the start that she's going to do that without telling the human and reacts to the request to leave by attempting to seal off the exit forever.

It's odd that she leaves the player alone suddenly after babying you through three puzzles, although I suppose she did say to wait for her rather than trying to go off on your own... still, it's a sudden change from her very protective attitude up until then for the sake of baking a surprise pie, and nobody who's ever played any game before is really going to spend even a moment sitting there.

[xviith_et_seq]

Hmhmhmhmhm. Suppose you were living isolated underground and had ample evidence that you were the most powerful thing around after spending so long adapting to it, and saw creatures whom you empathized with so strongly repeatedly falling in by accident. You have the resources to give them marginally acceptable lives there, but not the resources to get them out safely. Every last one of them so far has been ignorant or careless of the danger ahead and perished ignominiously after you allowed them their choice; they may well be perfectly knowledgeable about some other world, but as a result they get overconfident in this one, and they can't think of any reason to listen to you.

Would your emotions be fully stable after all that?

And do you allow it the next time?

(Perhaps keeping in mind that the question comes from someone whose predecessor, in the same physical form, seems to have had some form of posttraumatic augh whose trigger(-ish) was basically “foundational aspects of human civilization”, of course.)