Battle flavour text with MERCY selected

About this game

Developer: tobyfox · Publisher: tobyfox · Platform: PC (Steam) · Art style: Pixel art · Screen type: Battle / Tactics

More Undertale screens in the Gallery

What to study

The beat before any choice is made. Before the player picks ACT or MERCY, the game shows a flavour line for the enemy: '* Vulkin's cheeks glow with a bright heat.' The line is not decoration, it is the clue, the heat in the cheeks being what the player will act on, and the text box gives it the full width of the screen, the same box that will later hold the submenu and the result. Selection is shown twice over: the MERCY button at bottom right turns yellow and carries the small red heart glyph, the SOUL itself sitting inside the button it has chosen, while the other three buttons stay orange. That double marking, colour plus cursor glyph, is how a four-button row stays readable at a glance in a game where the cursor is also the player character. Frame at 23.9s in the UNDERTALE Trailer (Steam), second-pass extraction sp-mercy-23.9.png, accurate seek, inspected at full resolution (1920x1080). The large tilted 'SLAY THEM' and 'SPARE THEM' captions flanking the Vulkins are the trailer's own marketing text burned over the footage, and the thin green grid is a trailer production overlay; both are disclosed here and neither is game UI. The 23.4s bracket frame shows the same flavour line with ACT selected instead, confirming this beat is the selection state, not a settled menu.

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

battle-controls stat-panel

Components

Parts on screen.

Dialogue box Action bar Vitals bar

Screen inventory

• the wide white-bordered text box at centre: '* Vulkin's cheeks glow with a bright heat.'
• two white Vulkin sprites above the text box, one with closed eyes, one with heart eyes
• the MERCY button at bottom right in yellow with a small red heart glyph, the selected button, while FIGHT, ACT and ITEM stay orange
• the trailer's 'SLAY THEM' caption at upper left and 'SPARE THEM' caption at upper right, large tilted marketing text (trailer burn-in, not game UI)
• thin green grid lines across the upper field (trailer production overlay, not game UI)
• the status line 'LV 1' and 'HP' with a yellow bar and '14 / 20' beneath the text box

Top 3 colors

#000000 67%#19160f 12%#dcdbc3 8%

Top three palette colors by share. The remaining colors make up the rest.

Source and credit

© tobyfox, Undertale screenshot: UNDERTALE Trailer (Steam), shown for design study and commentary. PlayCraft is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by tobyfox.

Source tier 2 (publisher-released) · screenshot: Steam store page · Steam page

Source details

Fetched 2026-10-29. verified 2026-10-29: second-pass extraction sp-mercy-23.9.png @ 23.9s accurate seek in the UNDERTALE Trailer, MD5 66ded5b61f2196c372d8979d341dab8d, from the verified-clean re-download (46,402,863 B, 74.985 s, full decode to null exit 0), inspected visually at full resolution (1920x1080 native); flavour text, Vulkin sprites, yellow MERCY button with red heart glyph, LV 1 / HP 14/20 status line all legible; combined aHash plus dHash distance to the nearest existing Undertale keeper 176/512 (undertale-1), no near-duplicate

no published policy found (checked 2026-10-23); fair-use study use, takedown honored within 48h

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.