MERCY submenu: Spare / Flee list

About this game

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

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What to study

The game's moral verb, opened up. Choosing MERCY does not end the fight, it replaces the text box with a two-item list, '* Spare' and '* Flee', and the red heart cursor sits beside 'Spare' in yellow, the same heart that dodges bullets and points in menus, now doing duty as a menu pointer inside the battle box. The list is only two lines long, and that shortness is the design point: sparing is presented as a first-class action with exactly one alternative, fleeing, not buried in a longer menu, and the MERCY button stays yellow at bottom right so the player never loses track of which top-level verb opened this list. This is the only frame in the trailer that shows a battle submenu at all, and it is the frame the original 2026-10-23 audit noted as appearing only under the trailer captions. Frame at 24.4s in the UNDERTALE Trailer (Steam), second-pass extraction sp-mercy-24.4.png, accurate seek, inspected at full resolution (1920x1080). The large tilted 'SLAY THEM' and 'SPARE THEM' captions 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. Found in the bracket around held alternate manual-mercy-menu.png (23.9s), not the alternate itself: the submenu opens half a second after the flavour-text beat.

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

battle-controls action-list stat-panel

Components

Parts on screen.

Dialogue box Action bar Vitals bar Choices

Screen inventory

• the MERCY submenu inside the wide text box: '* Spare' in yellow with the small red heart cursor beside it, and '* Flee' in white beneath
• the MERCY button at bottom right in yellow, held selected while its submenu is open
• two white Vulkin sprites above the text box, the encounter still live behind the menu
• 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 70%#25160e 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-24.4.png @ 24.4s accurate seek in the UNDERTALE Trailer, MD5 203046b5842b28cb083042baaeb54e17, 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); Spare/Flee list, heart cursor on Spare, yellow MERCY button, LV 1 / HP 14/20 status line all legible; combined aHash plus dHash distance to the nearest existing Undertale keeper 168/512 (undertale-0), no near-duplicate

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

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.