These are the 50 best games of all time

34. Undertale (2015)

34. Undertale (2015)

What it’s about: A young child has fallen into an underground kingdom full of monsters. You can choose whether you want to befriend and show mercy to the creatures you meet or decimate them on a bloody path to the surface.

Why we like it:  Most RPG players never question the morality of their actions. A Slime draws near? Just murder it for the experience points and keep moving. Who cares about a Slime when you have a world to save?

Undertale is a game that turns the mirror towards the player and gives them consequences for the bad things they do. It treats the casual murder of an RPG video game with surprising seriousness. Undertale remembers everything you do to an almost frightening degree, and it never forgets a murder.

This choice between pacifism and violence leads to drastically different playthroughs, with multiple runs required to explore all of Undertale’s story. Undertale’s true genius isn’t what it has to say about static NPCs in a fictional world but what it reveals about the player. A Final Fantasy might be fine with you massacring goblins, but Undertale gives those creatures lives and personalities, and if you choose to act like a typical RPG protagonist, then it proves that the true monster is you.

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