Field manual

How to wander

OVERTALE plays entirely with a mouse or finger, except dodge phases, which use ↑↓←→ or WASD — or a drag on touch screens. Your save lives in your browser and updates automatically.

The loop

Travel the map, talk to everyone (more than once — greetings and options deepen with bond), Look Around for hidden items, and Venture Deeper in wilder reaches to meet what lives there. Talking, traveling, resting, and battling all spend minutes of the sixteen-hour clock. When the clock runs out — or the Chromatic Core is answered — the realm totals up your journey and hands you an ending.

Battle: four buttons

ButtonWhat it doesWhat it costs
⚔ FIGHTDeals damage scaling with your Level and any Keen Charm. Ending a creature grants full Insight and shards.−3 Kindness per swing, −8 per creature ended; drops the Mercy meter; the realm remembers.
☰ ACTCheck reads an enemy's stats and secret. Each enemy has three unique ACTs that fill its Mercy meter. Repeating an ACT gives half value — vary your kindness.Only a turn. Kindness usually goes up.
🎒 ITEMEat something from your pack to restore HEART mid-battle.The item, and a turn.
✕ MERCYWhen the Mercy meter hits 100% the enemy's name turns green — Spare them for Insight, shards, and a small permanent kindness written into the world. Flee exits most battles with no harm and no reward.Sparing gives slightly less Insight than the sword. Slower. Stays fixed.

Dodge phases

Between your turns, your SOUL enters the box and the enemy's pattern plays out in real time: falling shards, sine waves, lightning columns (watch for the dashed telegraph — move out of the lane), zigzag static, blooming rings, orbiting voids, sweeping thread-lines with a single gap, and the Core's mixed finale. You have brief invincibility after each hit. Survive untouched to earn Light Foot. The Plains Wanderer's advice: small movements.

Bonds, quests, and heart-to-hearts

Every conversation choice can raise an NPC's bond (0–100) and nudge your Kindness. The three great spirits unlock their personal quests at bond 60 — each one sends you across the realm for something only you can carry. Complete a quest, keep the bond growing, and a final heart-to-heart opens: the moment a spirit becomes a true friend. Three true friendships change what's possible at the Core.

Shards, shops, and charms

CharmSourceOne thing, done true
🌅 Dawn CharmNova's quest+15 Max HEART
🎼 Refrain CharmEcho's questACTs soothe +8% more
🌩️ Surge CharmCascade's questYour SOUL moves faster in dodges
🧿 Steady CharmForge: 3 shards' worth of crystal + ◈60All damage taken −2
🗡️ Keen CharmForge (sold reluctantly, with a look)FIGHT hits +4 harder
🕊️ Grace CharmForge: star fragments + ◈80Recover 3 HEART after every dodge you survive

Wear up to three at once. Materials found in the wild can be traded for shards at the inn — or saved for the forge. The Blacksmith needs both.

If your HEART breaks

The realm does not lose people. It has had enough of that. You wake by the hearth in Twilight Village, whole and held, having spent only a little time. Nothing else is lost.

Spoilers, politely fenced

The six endings (and one that is not on any list)

Each entry names its requirements. Open at your own delight.

☀ THE RADIANT ENDING — the best answer
Befriend all three spirits, complete all three personal quests (the First Prism, the Missing Sentence, and Tiny Thunder), harm no one on the entire journey, and spare the Shadow Within. The realm's question is finally asked in every voice at once — and you give it the answer the First Wanderer never learned. The Frayed, down on the string, holds nothing for the first time in an age, and hums.
✓ THE WHOLE-HEARTED ENDING
Befriend all three spirits and spare the Shadow Within. Your kindness doesn't defeat anything — it just makes a thousand years of grief finally light enough to set down. The village keeps a fire lit for you, whenever you're ready, however long.
△ THE GENTLE ENDING
Spare the Shadow Within with at least one true friendship (or run out the clock having made a true friend). Unfinished is not the same as failed — the realm has learned that wanderers can choose gently, and it will remember that when the next one wakes.
◇ THE QUIET ENDING
Reach an ending with no true friendships, but also no cruelty. You pass through the realm the way weather passes: noticed, harmless, gone. The Guide records, carefully, that you chose gently when it counted. The door is left unlocked behind you.
✗ THE DIMMED ENDING
End some of the realm's creatures along the way. The realm survives you — most things survive most things — but the crystals stay cloudy, the canyon's echo has a missing beat, and the Frayed grows a little heavier in your shape, because someone has to.
🌑 THE HOLLOW ENDING
Destroy the Shadow Within after a ruthless road (four or more creatures ended). You win everything that can be taken, and understand, in the silence, what the Shadow actually was. The Core beats on, in nobody's rhythm at all. Somewhere, a save file remembers a different you — and it is not too late to go back and meet them.
⟪◆⟫ ??? — a seventh, hidden ending
Somewhere in the code there is a 2% chance that, after your fourth battle, an encounter freezes mid-frame and something else steps through: THE ARCHITECT — the game itself, given consciousness. It addresses you by the designation B:06X and claims you are the realm's creator. It cannot be spared, reasoned with, or fled — its Mercy meter reads only "I AM THE RULES" — and at 120 HP with the hardest attack pattern in the game, it demands actual combat. Answering it is not counted as a kill (you cannot be cruel to logic), pays 999 Insight, and unlocks the hidden Meta Ending, which overrides every other ending and asks only one question: will you play again? Appears once per playthrough. Good luck being 2% lucky.

Achievement checklist (15)

Awake · Cartographer (all ten reaches) · Someone's Someone · The Three, Together · Soft Answer (spare ten) · Empty Hands (reach the Core harming no one) · Mind the Dark (walk the Understring) · Refraction · The Missing Sentence · Tiny Thunder · One Thing, Done True (wear three charms) · Light Foot (dodge untouched) · The Question at the Heart · Never Mid-Sentence · and one designated only ⟪◆⟫.

♥ YOU KNOW ENOUGH. GO.