Best Games Like Undertale

April 30, 2024

Highlights

Undertale has inspired a wave of offbeat, heartfelt games with experimental game design beyond traditional RPG norms.
Games like Omori follow Undertale’s footsteps in exploring how gameplay can reflect deeper human experiences.
Moon: Remix RPG Adventure challenges traditional game mechanics and storytelling norms, much like Undertale.

With a gorgeous cast of memorable and rip-roarious characters, a sublime soundtrack, and punchy, RPG-meets-bullet hell gameplay, Undertale is a one-of-a-kind experience that many flipped gamers’ expectations about storytelling, violence, and progression in video games on their head. That said, it has since inspired a slew of great titles, and its themes and mechanics hardly came out of nowhere. Undertale is threaded with loving references to (and wry parodies of) other video games, many from which it is spiritually descended.

A collage with Undertale characters that are subject to some popular theories: Sans, W.D. Gaster and Frisk from Delatarune.

Toby Fox’s Undertale is intentionally vague with much of its narrative, which has allowed fans to come up with these fascinating theories.

Since its release, Undertale has inspired many others to take a similar offbeat, heartfelt, and experimental approach to game design. While fans eagerly await the full release of its parallel, anagrammatic sequel, Deltarune (although the first couple of chapters are available to play), there are plenty of other games of its kind to try out. Some inspired Toby Fox in his development of Undertale, while the others that have been released since took some of Undertale‘s lessons to heart.

EarthBound

Undertale’s Spiritual “Mother”

Ness and his friends walking through a town

Platform: SNES, GameBoy Advance
Released: 1995-06-05
Developer: HAL Laboratory
Genre: RPG

Like Undertale, EarthBound subverts many RPG traditions by eschewing the traditional fantasy setting in favor of a modern one, taking kids’ perspectives in an adult world, and smattering heaps of goofy diversion and humor throughout the story. Just as it has inspired many other games since its release, EarthBound, and the Mother series generally, might be the most direct inspiration for Undertale; it was also where Toby Fox got his start in game development, with his Christmas and Halloween-themed (ROM hack) mods.

Undertale fans will recognize plenty of nods to the Mother series, including its dating of the story as “199X,” its Super NES art style, its penchant for playful puns, occasionally self-deprecating humor, and even the stripes on the main character’s shirt. While EarthBound does not share Undertale‘s “mercy” mechanic in fights, characters have a “check” ability (spying), which gives hints on how to best defeat an enemy, as well as other innovative battle mechanics seldom seen in modern games.

Last Command

A Vibrant, Character-Driven Bullet Heck

Platform: PC
Released: 2022-08-25
Developer: No Stuck
Genre: Action, RPG

While there are plenty of RPG elements in Undertale‘s DNA, most of its battles involve light bullet-hell-style gameplay. While bullet hell classics like Project Touhou may have inspired its gameplay, Undertale doesn’t exactly throw the most reflex-intensive challenges at its players. For anyone curious about Touhou, the best point of entry might be the tenth entry, Mountain of Faith. However, those who loved the stylish and highly-characterized bullet hell battles in Undertale might want to check out Last Command, which aligns more with the former’s “bullet heck” over “bullet hell” design ethos.

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Rather than a determined heart in a box, players control PYTHON, a “Crawler,” which old-school phone game players might recognize as similar to a snake. Last Command doesn’t just share Undertale‘s toned-down “bullet heaven” (as Toby Fox would put it) gameplay; the game is thick with atmosphere and charm thanks to the excellent gameplay-appropriate, hand-crafted characterization of its enemies, a compelling and emotionally-charged story, a crisp mix of 2D pixels with clean, 3D digital afterlife environments, and an excellent soundtrack to boot.

Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne

Chatting Up Monsters Who Can Talk Back

Platform: PS2, PS4, Switch, PC
Released: 2004-10-12
Developer: Atlus
Genre: RPG

While most Wizardry-inspired old-school dungeon crawlers from Japan had players vanquishing every monster or enemy fighter in their path, the Shin Megami Tensei series broke the tradition by allowing players to negotiate instead. Not every creature can be overcome via prudent parlance (bosses in particular). However, fans might appreciate the ability to turn foes into friends, allowing them to bring them into battle or even fusing them together to create all-new demons.

Although the older Shin Megami Tensei games are just as enjoyable (if not more difficult) and would bring a familiar menu style to Undertale, the entry largely considered to be the best modern entry point is Shin Megami Tenei 3: Nocturne, which sees the player character thrown into a world of demons following a metaphysical apocalypse above Tokyo. While most RPGs of a Japanese tradition tend to have fairly linear stories, Nocturne offers multiple endings depending on the player’s actions (and level of violence) throughout the game.

Omori

A Whimsical Trip Through The Crayon-Colored Abyss

Platform: PS4, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PC
Released: 2020-12-25
Developer: Omocat
Genre: RPG, Horror

As Undertale opened the way for more sensitivity allowances in video games, Omori followed it up with an examination of mental health, emotional resonance, and the darker elements of the subconscious, with a disarmingly cute throwback pixel and hand-drawn art style. Omari leverages emotions while delivering its narrative and mechanically. Players will no doubt have their heartstrings plucked eventually, and emotions literally come into play during battle as a rock-paper-scissors-like system.

Neku in The World Ends With You and Joker in Persona 5 Strikers

These JRPGs feature action-packed battle systems that give players a break from the familiar turn-based style.

Colorful, abstracted, and bursting with imagination, the look and gameplay should be familiar to fans of Undertale. However, the story, while exceptional, is tonally distinct from the happy-go-lucky, hopeful, and occasionally touching plot about the child who falls into the world of monsters, as players should not go into Omori expecting to recapture the fuzzy feelings that Undertale leaves behind.

Knuckle Sandwich

A Sizzling Buffet Of Microgame Meat

Combat against two skeletons involving a Galaga-style minigame

Platform: PC
Released: 2023-11-22
Developer: Andy Brophy
Genre: Adventure, RPG

Offbeat humor? Check. Vibrant and occasionally surprisingly beautiful visuals? In spades. Bespoke, thematically appropriate minigames for each enemy battle? Knuckle Sandwich boasts over a hundred. This passion-project RPG is set on a remote Australian island and leans into a realistic environment with magical elements occasionally airdropped in. The characters, too, are (for the most part) slice-of-life types who contrast deliciously with the surreal setting.

The poppy, late 90s internet visuals blend with the zany, funky musical stylings of early 2010s Nintendo of the WarioWare variety. If Nintendo’s Wario had cooked up the battle minigames, Professor Layton probably designed its puzzles, as they can become incredibly challenging, especially near the end. Anyone who saw the pre-solved joke puzzles in Undertale and wished they could actually attempt one might enjoy the corkscrew-esque difficulty curve of Knuckle Sandwich‘s headscratchers.

Moon: Remix RPG Adventure

Love-Up, Not Level-Up

Platform: PC, PS1, PS4, Switch
Released: 2020-08-27
Developer: Love-de-Lic
Genre: RPG

Given the ubiquity of standardized violence in adventure or role-playing games, Undertale‘s pacifist option is hardly a novelty in the genre but a welcome mechanical addition. However, Undertale isn’t the only game that allows players to right wrongs by abstaining from drawing blood and using understanding, empathy, and offbeat humor to progress. The gameplay in Moon: Remix RPG Adventure has the player undoing the damage of the Moon World’s “mighty hero” by catching the lost souls of all the slaughtered animals used as XP grind fodder and returning them to their bodies.

In the process, the player explores Moon World and gets to know all its eccentric inhabitants, learning about their routines, day-to-day lives, and even their secrets. Like Undertale, Moon deconstructs assumptions about what it means to “beat” a game, as the player is constantly presented with the ramifications that the “ideal video game protagonist” has on the world on his quest to gain quick levels and rake in gold, massacring hapless animals, and barging into people’s homes, smashing their ceramics for pennies.