After 7 years of being one of my favourite games, I think I finally found a thesis for my thoughts on Undertale. Since I don't really feel like writing a full essay or anything, and don't have much to say on level design or artwork or boss design, I'll summarise it here:

Undertale is an examination of LOVE - although on a broader scale, I think the game focuses on 'empathy' itself. Not just in terms of endearing players to its lovable characters, and asking them to forgive the unforgivable so that the world can move past vicious cycles; those themes are primarily relegated to the Pacifist, which I still adore for its passionate spirit, wonderful humour and touching story about "Determination". No, Undertale is fundamentally criticising the way its audience's empathy can become divorced from the way they play games. In most Neutral routes, the game calls uncomfortable attention to the accumulating impact of taking a life - producing unique interactions with Flowey, and culminating in the many variations of the player's call with Sans.

In the Genocide route, generally taken as the player's final route for completion sake, Toby Fox reveals his entire metatextual hand with a superb flourish. Encounters become a chore, the game's mechanics and characters resisting your impossible determination to butcher Toby's story, and in the final moments the player loses control of their character as they disregard, and murder, every element of the world. As the game repeats in the Genocide route (e.g. Snowman), everything has become useless to you. It's a haunting challenge to the idea of completionism, made even more potent by this route's recontextualisation of Flowey, the hateful villain of Undertale, as a literal mirror of what the player has become. Uncaring about the story, and devoid of 'empathy' or LOVE.

Finally, the anti-VN! Something that starts good, but gets much less interesting!

Don't get me wrong, Slay the Princess is really fun and snappy from moment-to-moment, and has a really great sense of both its characters' voices and artistic style. Furthermore, the game is super reactive to the player's choices, and even invents new characters on the spot to constitute the audience's swaying opinions on the plot, enhanced in enjoyable due to the clever, thoughtful prose given to these characters and the narrator - occasionally even matching my actual thoughts.

However, the ending stretch really muddles my feelings on the game (as it did for most people) - as it turns out, the metafictive format was actually intended as a commentary on the nature of death and rebirth in our universe, illustrating oppositional philosophical perspectives as deities and leaving the final judgement up to the audience (I think? It's a little unclear for me...). I personally thought this was really jarring for the story's actual content, which seemed to hint more towards a dissection of fictional constructs and their purposes for comforting or challenging us. In that sense, I found the Thorn to be a much more fulfilling ending, even if its story only focused on the relationship between two people stuck in an intrinsically mistrustful, yet potentially enthralling, relationship.

This might be an unfair/cliche comparison, but the ending struck me as a lesser replication of (THEMATIC SPOILERS FOR BEST GAME INCOMING!!) Outer Wild's ending; however, that game chose to centre itself around life and its potential for discovery/adventure, complimented with a time loop mechanic that pushes players to stubbornly oppose the universe's end. As such, the ending itself (which I won't spoil) becomes a rather beautiful and striking teaching moment, flowing perfectly from the game's tone and progression and leaving me with my favourite ending ever. By contrast, the misguided ambition of the far less textually-integrated message in Slay the Princess sort of fell apart; leaving me with a fun, yet almost insubstantial, experience.

As a side note: the game wasn't particularly scary (that may be intended, idk), but the sound design was good.