C24: Love and sales!  

Continued from the previous chapter...

It's been a long time, and I still haven't recovered from the ending of the massacre route.

I still don't know much about the plot of the game.

But that's not important. What's important is that I'm really depressed right now.

The ending of the slaughter really left me miserable and shook my heart.

Yes, I regret it. I don't regret playing this game. I regret playing this route.

Just like when I played "Magic Mirror," I was very interested at first, and then, after ending, my stimulation, I began to regret why I opened the game again and again.

Now that I've cleared the killing ending of "Undertale," I feel the same way. I feel the worst.

In any case, I really regret having played this ending.

I miss the peaceful mode that I played hours ago—laughing with my friends, watching Captain burn down the kitchen, drinking myself to sleep, listening to Papyrus's bad jokes, and eating Momma's pie.

"Let's make a perfect save again to end this game," I told myself.

With all kinds of memories in my mind, I took a deep breath and reopened the game.

I wanted to play the perfect, peaceful ending all over again.

With my previous experience, I was much more skilled this time.

I remembered many of them~ the spiders, the bone rats, the hairy hag, the chaste pony, etc. so I knew how to choose the correct dialogue and spread the light of my merciful heart.

In the end, I watched the sunset with Victory on the screen, and a faint smile appeared on my face.

Anyway, everything was over.

However, the next moment, the scene in the game stunned me.

In the dark night, the protagonist is sleeping in the room.

At that moment, the door was gently pushed open, and Toriel came in with a creamy cinnamon cake. She placed it softly on the ground and closed the door behind her.

It looked very warm, but the next second, the protagonist, who seemed to be asleep, suddenly sat up from the bed.

It was Chara's face, with a weird, twisted, and evil expression.

Then came the hideous and evil laughter, quite... High Pitch in my earphones.

As I left the room, a black-and-white photo appeared—a photo of the protagonist with friends from the underground world.

But now, except for the protagonist, everyone had a blood-red cross over their heads.

Then the game screen disappeared.

I sat in front of the computer, wide-eyed.

Still, it happened...

I had only skimmed some guides on how to trigger the massacre ending before, and now I finally understood why the author of that post suggested not to play it—because I would regret it.

I also finally understood the meaning behind some of the game reviews that I had found ambiguous before.

"When was it your turn to call the shots?"

Chara's words echoed in my ears once again.

I stared blankly at the interface of "Undertale" on the screen.

I had felt the deep meaning behind this game, something that should not be labelled as simply "vicious."

In most games, you can hurt the monsters, delete the save file, and then start anew, pretending like nothing happened, something never happened, going back again and again to love the monsters all over again with your swords and shields.

Haha, what a joke!

Stop dreaming!

Just like a broken mirror—no matter how well it's glued back together, the cracks will always remain.

Now that I've chosen to slaughter those monsters, how could I possibly go back and fall in love with them again?

In the dead of night, the save file I deleted seemed to come back to haunt me, tearing apart my self-righteous peace and beauty.

That eerie laughter at the end, the black-and-white photo.

Though there was not a single word, I felt deeply mocked.

Mocked for sitting there, staring at the screen, reloading my saved file with the thought of undoing the Massacre regret.

In the night, I felt it. It was as if someone was shouting in my ear through a loudspeaker.

"Stop pretending, you hypocrite!"

Can I change all of this?

I looked at the closed game and pursed my lips.

I logged into the "Undertale" community.

Just as I expected, alongside posts discussing the game's characters and plot, there were many questions about the dilemma I was facing.

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"Guys, does anyone know how to get back to a happy ending?"

---------------------------------

The same, the same thing! I beat the massacre ending, and now I regret it. I wish I could go back to the past!

Although it feels like I'm lying to myself, I still want to go back to the happy past!

Deleting the game, re-registering an account, buying the game with a new account... it was all useless!

As I scrolled through the posts, I felt a little better. After all, it's not just me. This Pain is something that decreases the more you share ~ the more I see, the less guilty I feel.

After rummaging through more posts, I finally found an accurate answer:

"Bad game save files directly overwrite cloud save files and system files, so you need to do a two-pronged approach: reinstall the system and then register a small account to buy the game again. This way, it's like starting a brand-new game. But don't log in with the old account, or it will detect the bad save and mess it up again. The designer is truly vicious, Oh Holy Lord!"

So that's how it works!

I was stunned, but soon I made a decision. I didn't plan to reinstall the system since I had saved a lot of teacher's learning materials in there, and some were downloaded online without good resource speed.

Plus, my hard drive has always been dominated by the C drive with no partitions.

So instead of reinstalling the system, I decided to just buy a new game on another computer.

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In Neon Games' office, Yang Xin the studio panda looks excited.

"We broke 300,000 sales altogether on all the platforms! And it's been less than half a month since our launch!"

On the computer in front of Yang Xin~ the cumulative sales of Undertale in various game platforms were displayed which were then forwarded to the database where they were calculated and aggregated.

Once word-of-mouth spread, major platforms started featuring Undertale on their homepage recommendation lists.

As for the official platform, its recommendation mechanism uses big data, which takes time, so we expect recommendations from them by next week.

Currently, we've hit 300,000 in sales, with 50% coming from third-party platforms.

"However, it seems many players contributed with a second purchase!" I looked at the data in the background, surprised by what I found.

Many of the purchase records showed that they bought Undertale again after their first buying.

"Yeah, a lot of these players had played the massacre ending out of curiosity, but instead they fell into the regret trap and to make themselves feel better, they bought a second copy to restart it again." Yang Xin explained, clearly more invested in the game than I was.

"Isn't this just 'stealing the bell'?" Ruan Ningxue joked from behind.

"Stealing the bell? Nah, the players love our game. But you are also not wrong!" I thought for a moment and concluded.

"Let's release the sales numbers and stir up even more excitement for the game." I continued...

As I talked, I logged into my official blog. Thanks to the previous hype and glowing reviews for Undertale, my blog's followers have finally surpassed 200,000 followers.

It's nothing compared to those well-known game producers with millions of followers, but it's still something.

More importantly, I now had a proper introduction beneath my username:

"CEO of Neon Studious, Producer of Magic Mirror, Undertale."

Before this, it was just "Game Producer" with no mention of my work or my studious. Finally, I had something to show up!

Idiom:

Stealing the bell - It means lying to yourself.