Navigation and Progress through Level Design.

The first thing I want to touch on is the navigation throughout the game. While navigating through a 2D game isn’t usually considered challenging or difficult, it was exceptionally easy in Undertale. While playing the game, I have not felt lost or sidetracked unintentionally once. The navigation always felt really natural, and whenever I had multiple routes or pathing options, I intuitively picked the right one. The levels seem to be intentionally designed to be rather linear and straightforward to allow the game to focus more on narrative, but there is more than that.

Intuitive Directions

Undertale takes something that 2D platformers have been doing for decades and adds a layer on top of that. The maps of the game always flow from left to right, meaning that the player will most often move to the right. By directing players into this behaviour from the very first room of the game, this intuition that has already been established by other 2D games gets reignited, creating a very familiar way of navigating through the levels in the minds of the players.

If you look at the overall map of the entire game, there is another prominent direction, which is up. Undertale not only focuses on bringing the player from left to right, but many areas within the game tend to send players upwards upon completion. This is another reason why players will rarely feel lost, because intuitively, they are likely to automatically start moving to the right and to the top of the screen in new areas.

If you look at the flow of each part of the map separately, you will find that earlier areas in the game tend to be rather flat and mostly moving to the right, while later areas will focus somewhat more on the upward movement. This is extremely interesting, since the shift in direction coincides with the ramping up and eventual conclusion of the storyline. As the player feels the storyline slowly coming to an end and the climax of the story getting closer, the level layout enhances this feeling by making the players feel like they are moving towards the surface more quickly.

So aside from the navigation reasoning behind this design decision, it also embraces and amplifies the narrative element of falling into a cave and having to travel through an underground world to eventually reach the surface again. For this setting, slowly moving upwards through your journey feels much more immersive and intuitive, especially with the upward movement accelerating near the conclusion of the storyline.