Case Study 2: Undertale --- Subverting Feedback Expectations

The Game That Lies to You (On Purpose)

Every game in this textbook teaches feedback through positive examples. Celeste shows what happens when feedback is done perfectly. Dark Souls shows what happens when feedback communicates weight and consequence. Breath of the Wild shows what happens when environmental feedback reinforces systemic interaction.

Undertale shows what happens when a game deliberately breaks its own feedback to make the player feel something no other medium can produce.

Toby Fox's 2015 RPG is the most important case study in feedback subversion in the history of the medium. It uses the player's learned expectations about how games communicate --- expectations built from decades of RPG conventions --- as a weapon. It rewards those expectations, reinforces them, and then, at precise narrative moments, violates them to produce surprise, guilt, dread, and emotional devastation.

Understanding how Undertale weaponizes feedback is essential for any designer who wants to use game systems to create meaning beyond mechanics.

Establishing the Rules: How Undertale Builds Feedback Expectations

Undertale's genius is impossible without its first two hours. Before the game can subvert expectations, it must build them. And it builds them using the same feedback conventions every RPG player has internalized since childhood.

The Standard Battle Feedback

When you encounter an enemy in Undertale, the game enters a turn-based battle screen. The feedback follows RPG convention:

• Attack option: Select "FIGHT," choose a target, and a timing-based minigame determines damage. A successful hit produces a slash animation, a hit sound, and a damage number. The enemy's health bar decreases. All of this is standard RPG feedback: action confirmed, damage communicated, consequence shown.

• Enemy attacks: The enemy sends projectiles at a small heart (the player's SOUL) in a box. Getting hit produces a damage sound and health loss. Dodging produces the satisfaction of survival. This is bullet-hell feedback: visual patterns to read, audio cues to learn, spatial awareness to develop.

• Mercy option: The player can choose "MERCY" to spare an enemy. This requires figuring out what the enemy wants (complimenting a sad enemy, petting a dog enemy, laughing at a joke) and then choosing to spare them when their name turns yellow. Sparing an enemy produces a gentle sound, a brief text message, and the enemy leaves peacefully. No experience points, but the encounter ends.

The feedback is clear, consistent, and color-coded. Yellow text means spareable. Red numbers mean damage. The heart is your life. The HP bar is your health. Every RPG player understands this language intuitively.

The Ruins: Training Ground

The first area of Undertale, the Ruins, is a carefully designed feedback training ground. Toriel, the maternal figure who guides you through the Ruins, teaches you the game's systems while simultaneously establishing emotional patterns:

• Monsters can be spared. The feedback for sparing (gentle music, enemy leaving happily) is warm and positive.
• Monsters can be killed. The feedback for killing (violent sound, enemy disintegrating, EXP gained) is harsher but still satisfying in the way RPG combat feedback is always satisfying.
• The game does not explicitly tell you which approach is "correct." Both are mechanically valid. Both produce clear feedback. Both work.

By the end of the Ruins, the player has internalized the feedback language and has made a choice: are they a player who spares, or a player who kills? This choice feels organic, natural, and personal. The game has not forced it. The feedback has guided it.

🧩 Design Lens: Undertale's training sequence is a masterclass in using feedback to teach without lecturing. Toriel never says "You should spare enemies." The MERCY option exists, the feedback for using it is positive, and some enemies are clearly sympathetic. The game lets the feedback speak. Players who choose mercy feel they discovered the pacifist path on their own. Players who choose violence feel they were never told not to. Both groups are correct. The game designed both paths and let feedback differentiate them.

The Subversion: Breaking the Feedback Contract

The power of Undertale comes from what happens when the game breaks the feedback patterns it spent two hours establishing. There are three major subversions, each targeting a different dimension of feedback expectation.

Subversion 1: The Feedback That Disappears

In a standard RPG, killing enemies produces reward feedback: EXP gained, GOLD acquired, level-up fanfare. Undertale provides this feedback in the normal route. Kill an enemy: EXP number appears, a sound plays, your LV (Level of Violence --- not "Level," though the player assumes it means Level) increases.

On the Genocide route --- the path where the player deliberately kills every single enemy in every area --- the feedback degrades. The music becomes sparse. The encounter text becomes terse. NPC dialogue disappears. The world empties. Shops close. Towns go silent.

The game is not adding negative feedback (punishment sounds, red flashes, "you are bad" messages). It is removing positive feedback. The world becomes a vacuum. The player's actions produce less and less response. The attacks still land, the enemies still die, the numbers still appear --- but the context that gave those numbers meaning is stripped away. There is no one left to react. The feedback loop collapses because there is nothing left to learn and no one left to teach.

This is the design equivalent of a conversation partner falling silent. Not angry, not disappointed --- just gone. The absence is louder than any accusation could be.

💡 Intuition: Removing feedback is one of the most powerful emotional tools in game design, and one of the least used. Players are so accustomed to constant feedback that its absence creates a visceral unease. The silence where a sound should be, the empty space where an NPC should stand, the missing dialogue where a conversation should happen --- these gaps communicate more powerfully than any amount of added effects could. Feedback subversion is not about adding surprising feedback. It is about removing expected feedback and letting the player fill the void with their own imagination.

Subversion 2: The Feedback That Changes Meaning

In most RPGs, your "Level" and "EXP" are positive metrics. Higher is better. Leveling up is a reward. The feedback for leveling up (fanfare, stat increases, new abilities) is universally positive.

Undertale uses the same terminology and the same feedback patterns. You gain EXP. Your LV increases. You get stronger. The feedback feels like progression.

Then, late in the game, a character reveals what EXP and LV actually stand for. EXP is "EXecution Points" --- a measure of how much pain you have inflicted. LV is "Level of Violence" --- a measure of how desensitized you have become to hurting others. The stat that you thought measured your growth actually measures your capacity for cruelty. The number you were proud of is a record of suffering.

The feedback did not change. The numbers are the same numbers. The sounds are the same sounds. What changed is the interpretation. The game retroactively recontextualized every piece of progression feedback the player received. Every level-up that felt like an achievement is now evidence of something darker.

This subversion is only possible because the game spent hours training the player to read EXP and LV through the lens of RPG convention. The convention said "numbers going up = good." Undertale exploited that assumption, let the player accumulate "progress" under the conventional interpretation, and then revealed that the convention was a lie.

Subversion 3: The Feedback That Remembers

The most unsettling subversion in Undertale targets the player's relationship with save files.

In every other game, saving and loading are meta-actions that exist outside the fiction. The game does not acknowledge that you saved. The game does not know that you loaded. Save/load is a mechanical feature, not a narrative element.

Undertale makes save/load part of the fiction. The character Flowey explicitly references the player's ability to save and load: "You just wanted to see what would happen if you killed everyone, didn't you? And then you reset, because you felt bad." The game knows you did a Genocide run. It knows you reset. It remembers --- and it tells you so.

The feedback here is meta-feedback: the game responds not to in-game actions but to player behavior at the system level. The save file contains a flag that persists even after a reset. If you completed a Genocide run and then reset to do a Pacifist run, the "good ending" is permanently altered. The game's feedback says: "You cannot undo what you did. The consequences persist beyond the save file."

This is a complete inversion of the feedback contract. Every other game says "your actions within the system produce consequences within the system, and you can undo them by reverting to an earlier state." Undertale says "your actions produce consequences that transcend the system, and reverting does not erase them." The save file --- the player's ultimate safety net, the meta-tool that makes all game consequences temporary --- has been weaponized against them.

🪞 Design Reflection: The reason this subversion works emotionally is that it violates an expectation the player did not even know they had. Every player assumes, unconsciously, that they have ultimate authority over the save file. They can always go back. They can always undo. Undertale removes that assumption, and the removal produces a feeling of genuine consequence that almost no other game has achieved. The player's actions matter in a way they are not accustomed to in games --- because the feedback system refuses to let them un-matter.

The Design Principles of Feedback Subversion

Undertale's subversions are not random cleverness. They follow specific principles that any designer can learn from:

Principle 1: You Cannot Subvert What You Have Not Established

Undertale spends two full hours establishing conventional RPG feedback before it breaks a single rule. The Ruins teach the player that EXP is good, that saving is safe, that killing produces rewards, and that sparing produces warm feelings. Without this foundation, the subversions would have no impact. You cannot surprise someone by breaking a pattern they have not learned to expect.

Application to your design: If you want to use a feedback subversion in your game --- a moment where the rules change, where the meaning shifts, where the feedback lies --- you must first spend enough time establishing the normal pattern that the player has fully internalized it. The longer the establishment phase, the more powerful the subversion.

Principle 2: Removal Is More Powerful Than Addition

Undertale's most effective emotional moments come from removing feedback, not adding it. The silence of the Genocide route. The empty towns. The missing music. The absent NPCs. Adding a "you are a bad person" message would have been far less effective than simply letting the world go quiet.

Application to your design: When you want to communicate something important, consider whether removing expected feedback would be more impactful than adding new feedback. A moment of silence after a fight. A character who stops responding. A health bar that disappears. The player's brain is wired to notice gaps, and it fills those gaps with emotions far more powerful than anything you could script.

Principle 3: Meta-Feedback Creates Existential Impact

When Undertale acknowledges the save file, the player's out-of-game behavior, and the persistence of consequences across resets, it operates at a level of feedback that most games never touch. The feedback is not about the game world. It is about the player's relationship to the game itself. This meta-feedback creates feelings --- genuine unease, guilt, surprise --- that in-game feedback rarely achieves.

Application to your design: Use meta-feedback sparingly and only when it serves the design. Acknowledging the player's out-of-game behavior (their save habits, their completion history, their play patterns) can create extraordinarily powerful moments, but it can also feel gimmicky or invasive if done carelessly. Undertale earns its meta-moments by grounding them in a narrative about consequences and responsibility. The meta-feedback serves the theme.

Why This Matters for Your Design

You are probably not making Undertale. You are probably not making a game that subverts RPG conventions or weaponizes save files. But the principles underlying Undertale's feedback design apply to every game:

Feedback is a contract. Every time your game produces a response to a player action, it is teaching the player to expect that response. Over time, these expectations solidify into trust. The player trusts the hit flash. The player trusts the health bar. The player trusts the save system.

Trust can be honored or betrayed. Honoring the contract produces reliability and satisfaction. Betraying the contract --- deliberately, at the right moment, for the right reason --- produces surprise, emotion, and meaning. Both options are available to you. The choice depends on what experience you want to create.

The most powerful feedback is the feedback that isn't there. When everything in your game is screaming (screen shake on every action, particles everywhere, constant sound), removing all feedback from a single moment creates a silence that thunders. Use that silence intentionally.

Undertale is not a technically impressive game. Its graphics are simple. Its code is straightforward. Its mechanical systems are basic by RPG standards. But its feedback design --- the way it builds, honors, and then systematically violates the player's expectations --- makes it one of the most emotionally powerful games ever created.

Feedback is not just about making things feel good. It is about making things feel true. And sometimes, the truest thing a game can do is stop talking.