After many months of my two kids (5 and 7) talking endlessly about the Undertale play-throughs they’d been watching on YouTube (this is a huge, huge thing for little kids, apparently), we finally got the game and started playing it together. The biggest source of frustration for me, and by extension for them, is how the basic gameplay mechanics involve what amounts to trickery on the part of the game. Everyone knows that the goal is to get through the game while killing as few monsters as possible. If the game made that simply difficult to figure out, fine. But what it does is present you with characters, your early ally Toriel being the best example, who are impossible not to kill unless you literally ignore all evidence the game provides to the contrary and keep doing the same seemingly ineffective shit over and over until, magically, it becomes effective. A game in which combat is an option but is to be avoided at all costs is a thoughtful evolutionary step for this genre; duping you into thinking it’s unavoidable unless you read the internet and find out you’re just supposed to ignore your lying eyes makes it much less so.