Undertale, Explained: Seven Soul Colors, Three Routes, One Big Idea

What Is an Undertale Soul? The 60-Second Version

Undertale is a role-playing game from 2015, made almost entirely by one person, Toby Fox, on a crowdfunding budget of about fifty thousand dollars. It went on to sell in the millions and is still, ten years later, one of the most quoted games on the internet. The setup is simple: humans and monsters once shared the surface. The humans won a war, drove the monsters underground, and sealed them there behind a magic barrier. You play a child who falls down into that underground and has to find a way home.

The rule it broke: you never have to kill anything

In almost every role-playing game ever made, the loop is: meet monster, kill monster, get stronger. Undertale keeps the battles and quietly removes the requirement. Every single enemy can be talked down instead — you can flirt with them, compliment them, tell them a joke, or just refuse to swing. Spare everyone and the game still ends. That option alone would be a gimmick. What makes it art is the second half: the game keeps track. Every monster you spare or kill is remembered by the world around you, and the story bends accordingly. You aren't picking a difficulty. You're picking who you are willing to be when nobody is checking.

LOVE is not love. EXP is not experience.

This is the twist that made a generation of players put down the controller. In the game's menu, you gain EXP and level up your LV — the two most boring, most universal numbers in gaming. Late in the story, you find out what the letters actually stand for. EXP is Execution Points. LV is Level of Violence. Your level was never a measure of how strong you had become. It was a measure of how far you had let yourself go — a tally of pain caused, sitting in plain sight, on the same screen you'd looked at for hours. Nothing about the interface changed. Only what you knew about it did.

The same trick runs deeper. Saving and loading — the most mechanical thing a player does — is written into the story as a force called determination, and certain characters can feel you using it. Reload to undo a death and they notice. A game commenting on the player's own habits was, in 2015, close to unheard of.

So why seven souls in Undertale?

Back to that barrier. It can be broken by exactly one thing: seven human souls. Human souls, unlike monster souls, persist after death — and the seven that fell into the underground before you each carried a different virtue, and glowed a different color. That's the whole origin of the palette you keep seeing on your timeline. Seven colors, seven virtues, one key. The fandom has been sorting itself into those colors ever since.

⚠ Spoiler line — three routes, three worlds

Undertale's difficulty settings are moral ones. The same opening leads to three very different games, and what separates them is what you chose to do.

Spare everyone

Talk down every monster you meet and the underground fills up instead of emptying out. Characters who would have been boss fights become friends, the world gets warmer the further you go, and the ending you earn is the one the game clearly wants you to have. It is also the hardest route emotionally, because mercy costs more than attacking and the game knows it.

Spare some, not others

The default for most first-time players, because that's how humans actually behave. You get a functional ending and, in the credits, a report on exactly which of your choices left a mark. Most people finish this route feeling like they got a passing grade on a test they didn't know they were taking.

Kill everything

This is where the game stops being a game and starts being an argument. Hunt down every last monster and the world doesn't fight harder — it goes quiet. Towns empty out. The music slows and warps. Puzzles you'd normally solve simply unlock themselves, because there's no one left to care. The game becomes tedious and cold on purpose: it is making you feel the thing it wants you to feel about what you're doing. And when it's over, it remembers. Starting a fresh save doesn't buy you a clean slate — which is, for a piece of software, an unusually pointed thing to do to someone.

Why it's still alive ten years later

Plenty of good games came out in 2015. This one stayed. Four reasons come up every time:

The mechanics and the message are the same thing

Most games say "violence is bad" in a cutscene and then hand you a bigger gun. Here the argument is built out of the systems themselves — the level counter, the save file, the empty town. There's nothing to skip, because the point is the gameplay.

The soundtrack refuses to leave your head

Toby Fox wrote character themes as recurring motifs and then bent them — same melody, different speed, different instrument, different emotion. That modular design is why the remix scene never dried up; fan covers on YouTube keep multiplying, and one boss theme in particular has escaped the game entirely into general internet culture.

It talks to the player, not the character

The story is aware that someone is holding the controller. Once a game does that convincingly, people don't just finish it — they argue about what it meant, for years.

The fandom builds more than the game contains

The community spun up an entire parallel industry of alternate universes — fan games, animated series, full soundtracks, comics — largely non-commercial, made for love. Ten years on, that machine still produces more content per month than most studios ship in a year. The follow-up game, Deltarune, is an anagram of Undertale, and every new chapter pulls the whole fandom back in.

Wait — is this Undertale or Deltarune?

Both, kind of, and the fandom mixes them up constantly. Deltarune is the parallel follow-up by the same creator, sharing faces and vibes but running its own story. The seven-soul-virtues idea comes from Undertale; if your friend called the test "that Deltarune soul thing", they're wrong and it does not matter. The virtues read the same human either way.

Which soul virtue is yours? Take the 66-question test

Reading about the colors is one thing. The Soul Virtues Extractor asks you 66 questions and scores every answer against all seven virtues at once — you get a full percentage spread, not one label, and the result card is built to be shared (or used as your next bio). Free, no sign-up, about 8 minutes.

Already got your color? Compare it with a friend →

FAQ

Do I need to play Undertale before taking a soul virtues test?

No. The test reads you, not your gaming history. Knowing the lore adds flavor, not accuracy — plenty of top results come from people who never touched the game.

What's the rarest soul color in the test?

There's no fixed rarity — the spread depends on who's answering honestly. But if every virtue lands near 50%, that's not broken: it means no single virtue is carrying you, which is its own kind of answer.

Should I play the game before reading this page?

If you're planning to play it: stop at the spoiler line and go in blind. The first playthrough is the entire point, and it only happens once. If you're never going to play it — most people reading this won't — then read on, you're not losing anything.

Is this an official Undertale website?

No — this is an unofficial fan project. The quiz, its questions and artwork are original creations inspired by the seven-virtues idea; nothing here is affiliated with the game's creators.

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