The Path of Needles or the Path of Pins: Violence and the Consequences of Violence

this one's been cooking for a while! (the fear and hunger / undertale / deltarune essay that talks about jrpg trope subversion)

tl;dr - I think it's interesting how some games like to subvert the typical RPG Power Fantasy

There are two trains of thought you could pursue when dealing with Violence in games. Or rather, there are lots of trains of thoughts with regards to how to handle violence in a narrative way but I’ve been thinking a lot about these two options (not to say there aren’t other approaches entirely).

It is important to say off the bat this is only within games wherein you’re allowed to choose to not fight. There are plenty of games to note where they say or want to say profound things about videogame violence but then do not allow you the choice to not engage with Violence. Middens is a game that comes to mind, as outside of it’s surrealistic atmosphere and style it very much seemed like it was written to say profound things about violence (gun violence in particular but also the cycle of violence in general). You’re given a gun who tells you in no particular order that if you kill things they stay dead. It does not give you an option to simply not commit, which is fascinating as its creator pushed it as a Yume-Nikki like. Yume Nikki likes / surreal exploration games don’t often have violence or rpg-like combat in them prior to Hylics (if you count hylics for that).

It is, however, very poorly written. It is a fair criticism here to point out that for a game that talks big game about the cycles of violence and where they come from, it does not reward you for choosing the path of pacifism and arguably denies you the choice entirely. This is while it spouts that “well violence is bad and you are bad for participating in this violence”, while not allowing you to ever commit to the bit of simply not killing people within that game. I suspect some of this could come from the issue of the developer not knowing how to make an rpgmaker game that would satisfy this narrative while also not including a combat system. I do suspect given the developer’s general character that this is more authorial choice and intent on his part rather than an issue with the game engine like could be argued about OFF and it’s combat / Narrative issues. It is fascinating that this game does have a very soft / mild redemption mechanic that is difficult to attain and not entirely rewarding and I suppose one could argue from that, that the path to forgivness and redemption is not as easy as people make it out to be, but it is also something discouraged within the games narrative to be pursued entirely, kind of rendering the point moot. Plenty of other games like playing around with the idea of “well everything is killable and you can just kill everyone”, middens is just the earliest in the indie rpg scene that I can think of that tried (and failed) to grapple with some of these concepts.

Everhood is a game much more recent and despite the issues with it, I think handles this much better than Middens does. Now I don’t think that you should just run around killing everyone willy nilly, but it thinks more creatively about this and does engage with the ideas quite a bit better. Not really a big fan of the buddhist themes and how it handles the themes to self-justify all the violence there, but I usually disregard those. Feels a tad like they kind of used those to reinforce the baseline ideas rather than digging into the worldbuilding, so as a result I kind of just don’t engage with those (though perhaps I ought to).

OFF is another game that falls a little closer to a gray zone. Outside of select significant fights most fights can be fled from. Most people argue that the one thing really holding back the game is the fact that it has a combat system and that it is a case of “you can’t do both”. I’d disagree that you could have a combat system and say profound things about that but the point of OFF itself isn’t really about the violence contained within directly. It is a fair criticism to suggest that the game very well could be told without an RPG fight system and while one could do that, I think it’s alright that the game does have that and that the developers chose to use it in the way that they did.

I do think there are at least two schools of thought to for having a narrative or metanarrative “hey please don’t choose violence” message while also containing combat in games. Now things aren’t limited to just these two trains of thought, that’s too constricting, but these are the two that I’ve found most effective and Thought Provoking.

The path of needles, or Undertale’s approach to violence within the Genocide route is one such train of thought, while the Path of Pins, Fear and Hunger’s approach, as the other.

Undertale

Undertale is, among other things, a game about consequences for actions. This is to say that there are actual gameplay consequences for picking violence rather than trying to spare monsters your encounter. The game gives you many opportunities to back out of the “genocide” route as it’s called, where you must kill every single monster in every zone. This is a notable slog of a grind, as there is in fact a set amount of encounters in each room of each zone and you have to be thorough and meticulous to get each monster killed. You cannot simply just kill every boss encounter and say it’s good. It is punishing in that the upfront time cost is rough on players who may just be raring for those edgy scenarios while not having the patience to follow through or really want to grind hard. It is a lot of time making sure you don’t miss a monster because even one monster left alive in any zone prior to the point of no return (which is New Home), means you get a neutral ending scenario instead. A good example of this is the discussion that Schaffrillas has in his video (How Undertale (Accidentally) Broke Me) about how he got so close but then got locked into the neutral ending because he missed two monsters in hotland. Much like the Pacifist run you do not / are not intended to get the Genocide run done first. There are some points of payoff, as there is the implication and allure of challenging and difficult fights, and many people love to fight challenging and difficult fights. But those are few and far between due to that route’s pacing as a result of the upfront grind cost related to even getting and then maintaining a perfect kill count throughout the entire game (as pointed out earlier, it is very easy to miss monster encounters so it requires a level of thoroughness).

All the while the game subverts tropes and expectations, and a lot of it feels like jabs at the completionist mindset. Flowey talks at length about it in-game and I do believe there’s a good video by NezumiVA who goes more at length about the genocide run and what it does accomplish. This is a game about consequences and here are the consequences for wanting to complete the game, completely root around its guts before moving on to the next after you get your haul of achievements.

As NezumiVA speaks at length about and Adam Millard and Andrew Cunningham speak at length about in their own videos. As Mollystars eloquently puts in their hour long video’s undertale segment (the video itself is a deltarune theory video but it's got a great undertale section in it), undertale is at least a little bit about “Is a happy ending good enough for you / the player”, “Don’t you have anything better to do after the good end?”. These are jabs at the completionist mindset of “well, I have to see everything, I have to be able to say I’ve done it all at least once”. The Genocide route is deliberately not a fun time, and it is a lot of upfront cost with time and grinding, not to mention higher diminishing returns than that of the pacificst route (Sure you get more gold yield by killing monsters than sparing them on top of XP but at the downside that once a monster is dead that one’s permanently out of the monster pool, so once you run out of monsters for an area that’s all the money you’re gonna get). The two highlight fights are very challenging but it can be said that a lot of people would look at that and say “well I already had a rough time with neutral ending undertale, I don’t think the grind’s worth the highlights”.

Fear and Hunger

The other Alternative, the Path of Pins is how it is handled in the Fear and Hunger Games. I see it as diametrically opposed to Undertale in this regard, and it is also tonally the complete opposite. I say this firmly in that the game is very dark and one should heed the content warnings about it before deciding to play since it is a very extreme Survival Horror Game that has every type of violence under the sun baked into it, inside or outside of its actual combat system. I think it is good in that the game does go out of its way to not paint any of it as glorious and condemns the worse parts of it but it is not a stream safe game and it does have some flaws as well (one notable flaw is that sometimes the games are prone to slowdown / crashing issues).

Fear and Hunger is a very mean and cruel game. It also is often not a fair one but it is one that demands learning how to play it to succeed. I pick this rather than a souls like game like dark souls (which is hard but fair), because it isn’t about the challenge of it. Souls likes tend to inspire that sort of mindset where you overcome challenges and it really is the payoff for beating a challenge. That sort of thing simply isn’t present in either existing Fear and Hunger game. Dark souls and other souls like games are about challenges and overcoming them, while you can make a very compelling argument that Fear and Hunger (and its sequel) are about choices, consequences, and violence.

Undertale may ask “is a good ending good enough for you?”, fear and hunger asks “well there is no happy ending or payoff to be found here, why are you playing such a mean game with no external reward or bragging rights attached?”. Or more simply rather than Undertale's “can you have fun playing the bad end”, it asks “well it’s hard and not really fun so why do you still choose to play?”

The game makes it really clear from the start that this is not going to be a happy and fun game

It’s going to be hard, cruel, and a rough experience. It is very upfront about this. This has a tendency to put people off but just as equally for people to engage with it anyways despite not being fun. While I can’t speak for all people playing, a good subsection of people get into the mindset that there’s got to be a payoff for surviving the whole ordeal. Like trying to get the best ending in the game, it’s something you have to work hard for. It starts off as innocently as “well you have to save the captain of the guard who’s at the bottom” and if you do successfully get to him in time, it becomes “well wait a minute I led him to the exit why is he going back? What’s worth it that he’s willing to go back for?”

Though I cannot speak for everyone that is an aspect, just as much as there are people who engage with the Undertale Genocide ending for the challenge and for other reasons rather than the simple appeal of “well okay I want to see how bad it gets when I rp evil rather than good like the game is pointing me towards”. Because there’s always people doing it because they find challenging content rewarding to play (and this is distinct from Fun to play).

The theme keeps up with Fear and Hunger: Termina, it’s sequel. It is a difficult game to play, just as cruel and Mean as the Original Fear and Hunger, but it pivots its gameplay loop slightly. While one could argue in fear and hunger that it is most important to get teammates if only as a buffer to your core protagonist character, Fear and Hunger termina gives you all the tools to make one man killing machines. It is difficult and the difficulty only grows with managing your teammates as well as other competing players in the Termina Festival. Especially as with the passage of time choices will open and close for the player. As will be circled back to later, Fear and Hunger: Termina absolutely is more about choices and consequences than even the First Fear and Hunger is. Choices are important and people in that game are making them all the time. This is including the options of when you decide not to choose or to not engage, as potential party members do in fact go through things while you and your party are doing other things. It’s a little like Majora’s Mask in that regard that they are in fact just doing stuff with or without you.

The Typical RPG Power Fantasy

Both games are subversive of the typical rpg power fantasy videogame in key ways.

If you look at the traditional format a lot of the times its dramatic backstory, kill the monsters, find awesome treasure and loot, get the girl, save the world, case closed. No consequences or strings attached to it.

In Undertale this power fantasy is subverted by the fact that not only is there a viable way to navigate the game without resorting to killing monsters, it is something that’s rewarded near equally as picking the option to fight and kill. While the game narrative absolutely has a lot to say on choosing violence when you have a nice happy game experience without the violence, from a mechanical point it is just as engaging to work out how to spare enemies as it is trying to kill them, and while you’re not rewarded with EXP for sparing monsters, you are still rewarded with a lot of currency (and via sparing monsters you get more long term gold even though you would get more upfront with the genocide route in the short term) which can help offset the health bar cost when going against higher enemies that normally is buffed up through gaining EXP.

It also has a lot of deviation worked into it via its choice system, since you have the option to spare and kill near every monster you ever encounter in that game. There’s a plethora of neutral endings, not to mention the variation in judgements depending on which bosses you kill / do not kill as well as for how many common monsters one’s killed over the course of their journey.

Even on the Genocide route there is an equal amount of content there as in the neutral and true pacifist endings, content that is just locked behind a lot of grinding and tough encounters.

Fear and Hunger also subverts this but through tilting the game unfairly. It makes itself abundantly clear that you don’t gain anything immediately from winning fights. Not that tactical fights don’t pay off in the long run, but there’s no use in grinding it out, as you’re not going to level up and you’re likely not making a lot of money trying to grind it out either to justify the very real and risky cost of fighting. It’s not worth it to grind out experience points.

While backstory choices can make the difference it is painfully obvious that it does not matter who you are, once you’re in the dungeons of fear and hunger it’s up to your wits on how well you survive. Fight encounters feel very unfair because while each party member has one, maybe two attacks total / per character, enemies have as many attacks as they do limbs and as a result can deal out massive damage. Not only that, but you can lose life and limb in these fights and it carries through for the rest of your run. Lose and arm and two-handed weapons are locked out for you, be unfortunate enough to lose both legs and you’re stuck at a crawl with no ability to run. Get your eyes pecked out? Now you don’t have visibility.

To that end, Fear and Hunger games say “Fighting doesn’t always have any good payoff and often times the risk isn’t worth the meager rewards”.

It is interesting in that end, that the choices you make do matter to an extent. They’re just handled in a mildly different way. Stakes are higher so you really must consider each fight you pick, not to mention the butterfly effects of early game / backstory choices and how that can make or break whole runs in the late game (if you even get to the late game).

It’s not to say that there’s no point to fighting, as to get any of the really interesting ends you do have to engage with the combat and not completely strategize around no combat at all. Interestingly, the way it’s handled in the game is that they are set overworld encounters, so while there’s no gain from killing enemies for traditional things, it may be worth your time to fight some enemies if you know you’re going to be in an area for extended periods of time.

While there are endings for escaping the dungeon your main goal is to try to save the person called Le’garde and explore the dungeon. In hard mode you cannot save Le’garde at all and in the regular difficulty settings you do have a hard 30-minute deadline from starting the game to get to Le’garde or else you find him dead. You can dig and dig into the dungeon and find out a lot about its world, but this is all undermarked by the fact that any one fight where you get killed will result in a game over. Save scumming in this context is rewarded and not commented on in that regard while in Undertale the game makes a metanarrative point to comment on it. As stated earlier, there are endings where you do get out of the dungeon, and the earliest point of that would be finding Le’garde’s fate, dead alive or otherwise. Most of the endings are for digging deeper into the game once it opens up as a result of Le’garde’s death or rescue, and at that point you can either simply hit the bricks and leave the dungeon, or push deeper to find out more about it. Compared to Undertale’s 3 types of endings (with several variants of the normal ending depending on who you leave alive or dead), you have 6 common endings and then 4 S endings which are hard mode and character specific. Most of these endings are not what people would generally call happy endings.

It's a game where violence is heavily punished, but in stark contrast to a game like Middens, it isn’t necessarily discouraged (or rather the game doesn’t force you to combat then tell you you’re bad for choosing despite there being no choice in the first place). Rather, each encounter is kind of like a puzzle and the real trick of the games is how you play them if you want to be successful. It’s not that all violence is bad within this game Moreso that you must pick and choose your battles carefully as consequences are severe if you try to brute force things. Still, you can make a great argument about how the game does show that it is not always the best to use violence for every occasion. Like how you shouldn’t take a hammer to fix all problems lest everything begin to look like a nail, you must pick your fights carefully and sometimes there are clever ways to get around fighting at all, as it’s not a hard requirement per se to get the endings. I circle back to middens a little bit for its terrible writing because it is deeply ironic that a game that tries to drop the anvil of “well you shouldn’t do violence, violence bad” but then locks its “best” ending behind a ludicrously high kill count and fails to make a compelling narrative or metanarrative about the cycle of violence whereas Fear and Hunger makes better arguments about it without really meaning to.

It’s sequel, Fear and Hunger Termina has less endings but is far more difficult, and I think, plays around with your actions having consequences a great deal more than in the first game. The game is set that you (the player character you pick out of the staggering number of options available to you), are one among 14 on a train ride to Prehevil. You all get the same ominous dream that Perkele tells you that the Festival of Termina is upon you, and will end in 3 days. The winner is who survives, as 14 must become 1 or there will be consequences. After that, you’re allowed to explore, recruit team mates, and do whatever with the passage of time happening when you sleep in a bed (a very deceptively rare resource). For those particularly bloodthirsty players looking for a real challenge, one ending is in fact gained from killing all 13 of your other festival participants. There are Moon scorched variants of these contestants that may appear as a result of time passing, but you are given the option to straight on fight them at most any point in the game, and while they aren’t easy fights, fighting them while they are still civilians can be easier than their moon scorch counterparts.

This really illustrates that despite these games being made with replay ability and being more akin to roguelikes in mind, the developer of this game really does put a lot of thought and work into these games, regardless of how you feel about the amounts of violence, gore, and graphic imagery that is in this game. There are so many interesting ways people can have playthroughs with fear and hunger termina in that whether you talk to a certain character or have them in your party or not can affect things later down the line. It can very well be the difference of “well it’s easier to fight them now than have them show up as a harder moon scorch fight later”.

It’s like if Undertale said “oh well if you don’t kill Undyne right now, right after Mettaton the genocide route version of Undyne pops out and kills you instantly”, while still giving you options that avoid killing Undyne at all (as there are some endings in fear and hunger wherein people survive).

The big connecting line between two such drastically different games is that your choices narratively and meta-narratively matter. In Undertale’s Genocide there is no picking and choosing, you must fight and kill everyone and grow stronger for it. You are not allowed a single spared or missed monster. In Fear and Hunger, you must pick your fights and your team mates carefully as every fight could be your last and there is little judgement on whether you take the path of pacifism or ultra violence. You could run the dungeons by yourself and run the risks of losing life and limb, or gain allies but have to deal with the resource management of making sure you all do not starve and the resource drain that having extra team members brings (as items for managing food, health, and sanity are few and far between, not helped by all item locations for those sort of things being in a big randomized pool such that some runs you have amazing luck and other runs you cannot find a single healing item). There is an unmentioned luck component in the fear and hunger games with the lucky coin and how coin flips work, and how that can swing things in your favor, but it is situational as sometimes you can just be that Unlucky.

Not a two-way street

I think of this in more of a weird 4 directional chart rather than a spectrum of “this is less violent this is more violent”, wherein the fear and hunger games oppose Undertale on one axis, but are in the exact same place on the other axis. They’re both making solid points on discouraging violence in terms of metanarrative and narrative but take complete opposite approaches. Undertale questions why people may engage in violent videogames through the lens of completionism, while Fear and Hunger probes more into “well why do people engage with things when they stop being fun as a form of entertainment, let’s dig around in to how a game that’s pointedly unfun can still leave people feeling rewarded for each successful run completed”. Undertale grapples with how completionism can make games quickly unfun as you suck your mileage out of them just to get the achievement of it all, while Fear and Hunger wrestles with how / why people may engage in games they may find rewarding that aren’t really fun in the first place.

I do not mention deltarune here though perhaps I ought to. Deltarune could very much be about some of these questions just as much as undertale is about these questions. That game is set such that there’s really going to be one way the game ends after all 7 chapters are done. It’s a little bit about railroading and how in undertale your choices mattered, that in deltarune “your choices do not matter”.

That being said, If you push hard enough you see a second throughline of “well your choices don’t matter, because while you can make choices you don’t face the consequences of them”.

It makes sense, that if you pick actions, consequences for those choices also happen. We see this readily enough In undertale but we also see this in chapter 2 of Deltarune and it’s “Weird Route”. This weird route is functionally like a genocide route but with one complication. While in undertale you are the one most receiving the consequences of those choices (and for some people the consequences of newgame+ style harder bosses for choosing to kill everyone is in fact the draw there), in Deltarune you are not facing those consequences.

You can try all you might with chapter 1 but it is impossible to really kill enemies in that chapter. While in the genocide Sans Fight sans makes a point of dodging and comments on the fact that most monsters are perhaps a little too polite to give the player character the first turn / not dodge, in Deltarune (or at least chapter 1 of deltarune) the darkners are aware enough of things to straight up flee battle if things go too south for them outside of select fights.

This begs the question, if Darkners run away well before they can get killed, how does one even go about a genocide or genocide-adjacent route?

You strong arm this by forcing a team member, Noelle, into doing all the killing and violence for you in chapter 2. More specifically, in combat after explaining it to her, it turns out she's a pretty fast spellcaster and can freeze opponents before they can flee, which is effective for killing enemies.

You do have to do a lot of pushing in the options to wear her down into compliance, but right at the narrative peak of the route you get Noelle to the point where you can push her into Killing Berdly. If anyone sees any consequences for this, arguably it’s Kris and Noelle. Whatever Susie sees when she winds up alone with Noelle is enough to freak her out. From Noelle’s perspective after seizing some sort of control again she starts blocking it out of her mind and self-justifying what parts she can’t block out. It’s simply getting stronger, it’s (the dark world) all just a dream. She’s unwilling to give control up, even if it’s just letting her dad play her videogames. Especially with the post-hospital scene with Noelle depending on what choices you make in that Dialogue (and whether or not you took any gear off of her to wear yourself), it freaks out Noelle. It freaks her out because it forces her to confront the reality that all of what happened in the Dark world did happen, and all that she did or was pushed to doing really did happen.

Undertale and Deltarune play around a lot with choice and consequences for choice (or lack thereof in Deltarune). Fear and Hunger and it’s sequel game also play around with choice but rather than in a mostly narrative only sense, it plays with the mechanical consequences of those changes but then works it back into the micronarrative.

I can only speculate how much of this comes back from the proto-typical JRPG where it really is a “But Thou MUST!” situation often about why the characters do this and casually engage with some really weird behaviors when pulled outside of the context of the videogame.

It is fascinating since you can even see this from other rpg-like games that are subverting / try to subvert / try to just poke fun at the typical jrpg formula. Moon RPG Remix is often cited as an early game that subverts and pokes fun at the whole formula, and it wasn't as if there weren't also games like earthbound coming out, which really played around with the formula that you see set in stone from the likes of Dragon Quest, Final fantasy, and the like (especially when you look into the really old eastern rpg genre).

I specifically talk about JRPGs and the sort rather than western RPGs since there's distinctly different histories between the two. I mean Pokemon as a franchise can be counted as an RPG game and it is not a medieval fantasy setting.

RPGMaker games and the “True”-est ending you must work for

This is kind of a common trope for RPGMaker horror games that if they are narratively driven, there’s gotta be more than one ending, and the ending that the community generally agrees upon as being the “best” ending, is more often than not one that has several “guide dang it” moments, wherein you have to have at least played through the game completely once before. This would in theory make it easier to spot within subsequent replays, though this isn’t a hard and fast rule.

One example would be the witch’s house, wherein the ending that answers the most questions (though it is not quite a happy ending) is locked behind doing several sidequests including getting a key item during the very last chase segment.

Ib is another game wherein this is kind of poignant. The best ending that involves both Ib and Gary escaping does require some extra work, and being aware of those important choices and events enough to work around it. You need to do a sequence of things correctly in order for it to work, as well as working around a “doom counter”.

We even see a little bit of this in OFF in that the “secret ending” is locked behind trying to collect several key items.

This is a trope that is at least somewhat littered around the RPGMaker horror scene for a while.

While I don’t think Toby meant to make a game that subverts this trope, the brilliance of how he handled pacifism vs combat accidentally wrote a game in which all the endings are still valid unto themselves and unto each other, while in other RPGMaker games there’s kind of a consensus that if the ending isn’t agreed to be the best it isn’t considered canonical. You do have to work hard to get both the true pacifist route ending, as well as the genocide ending. That being said while not intended to be done in one’s first playthrough, toby does point it out at the end of your first neutral run that there is still more to find, and while it nudges you along towards true pacifist there’s technically nothing stopping you from genocide either. These things also are introduced in the Ruins as sort of part of the tutorial for the choice system in Undertale to begin with, as the game is pretty transparent that there is a real combat system you can use, as well as a spare system. You don’t really start seeing external punishments or “guide dang it” moments until you get to the Genocide route and even then, the punishment is more “well you didn’t commit hard enough to the bad end” and gets into intrinsic motivation rather than external types of punishment.

As a side tangent I do point out that it’s more intrinsically trying to communicate than doing hard and fast punishments for things. An example I can think of a game really punishing a person for trying to cheat around game mechanics would be the game “The Longing” which takes place over the course of 400 In Real Life™ days. It has a unique thing set up for people who try to just skip to the end by changing their digital clock. It is not as if it would be difficult to create punishments like that within Undertale to try to force people to play pacifistically, though I would hazard that the reason why it doesn’t is tied up in the importance of Choice to Undertale. It’s not enough to do pacifism under duress, kind of like how it fails in Middens because there is no choice to commit to pacifism in the first place. For any of the game’s messaging regarding either route it is fundamentally important for it to be a choice on the Player’s part.

This is also apparent in Fear and Hunger and its sequel as they’re all at least plausible to be happening. Some of this might be the Roguelike aspects of the game and trying to make it replay-able, but in the first game there is not much that directly can contradict the endings from each other (or at least how they relate to the sequel). More contradictions tend to Happen with Fear and Hunger Termina but that’s kind of a result of the plot and its replay-able nature. If you look at it only from the perspective of the first game, it is rather similar to Undertale in that regard.

I do wonder how much of this is trope grandfathering in from Corpse Party, of which I suspect is the initial trope-setter if you don’t get into some of the stuff you see in more mainline JRPG games of old where there’s more of an Eleventh hour super final boss or things of that nature. I haven’t really done a lot of research into that myself but I do have a hunch that the Corpse party games are the typeset here.

Well Wait a Minute what about Lisa: The Painful?

At this point when talking about JRPG style games and violence and trope subverion, those that have been around the block for a while might ask "well what about the Lisa Games. They tick off all the boxes that's gotta be something right?"

The Lisa games are very violent and while they are saying something about violence in videogames I think that's more a part of a larger picture the Lisa games bring to it's own discussion about things like Masculinity and identity and how that's often involved with violence. Worm girl highlights the type of archetype it really explores among all the other things that happens in that game (in the first section of a longer video about a fangame for Lisa).

It is a very fair point of comaprison, the Lisa games, in comparison to Fear and Hunger. Almost just as fascinating as the fact that people seem to be able to speak at length about Fear and Hunger and readily do so, while the same doesn't seem to be the same for the Lisa games. While both are very brutal and do engage with some really rough content like gore, violence, and sexual violence, I guess the way the Lisa games handle it as character studies tends to be harder to speak at length about than in Fear and Hunger. if you'd like to watch it, hbomberguy does talk at length about it in Lisa: The Analysis, and if you're interested you could watch it (though I would recommend at least giving the game a try beforehand, but i'm not your boss you do what you want).

I would say in the hypothetical 4 square the Lisa games are also in proximity to fear and hunger in a similar way to how Undertale is, but perhaps in a different other adjacent square, kind of like

I am not going to be a strange completionist but also I feel like there really ought to be a game that can fit in that final square, something that I think is not quite deltarune. This is also not an accurate model to what i'm really thinking of, but also it's a little hard for me to conceptualize it enough to be able to really accurately draw out what I mean when I talk about this hypothetical 4-square diagram.

So, what about Lisa the Painful / Joyful?

They are subversive of the typical JRPG Power fantasy and do engage with a lot of violence and gore, but being a criticism of choosing violence is at the backburner for the games because they are tackling other topics. Topics like Masculinity, Abuse and the sometimes cyclical nature it takes, substance abuse, and a few other subjects. As worm girl puts in her video I link to earlier, the games takes it more as a character study of it’s protagonists and characters more than being about the setting / a character study of the player like how Undertale and Fear and hunger respectively take it with their violence. It’s about deconstructing the archetype that Brad is in more than about the player’s choices. It’s not about Olathe, it's not about the player, but it’s about Brad Armstrong, or the type of guy that Brad embodies (and then deconstructing that).