Undertale

My 13 year old daughter begged me for this game. I was a bit skeptical at first, but I gave in after a few weeks. You can choose to kill everyone (11+) or make peace and save everyone (8+). My 8 year old son even played it. He used to be terrified of skeletons, but he got a little laugh out of Sans. My favorite character: Toriel My daughters favorite: Papyrus!! My sons favorite: Sans!! Sometimes the characters do curse, but the only ones I remember are LMAO, hell, and damn. Nothing your 9 year old hasnt heard before. There is a bit of violence, but overall I recommend this game for 8+

Undertale is honestly one of the single best games to come out in the past decade. If you want a game that has a story that's funny, tear-jerking, and heartwarming (sometimes all at once), then this game is for you. I'm college aged, and among people my age who have played this game many say that this game has done incredibly healthy things to their faith in humanity. As many other reviewers have pointed out, this game has a morality system- you can choose to kill enemies, or talk things out and settle it peacefully. Undertale actively rewards those who go for the pacifist option of sparing everybody, and gets darker and more bleak if the player kills more characters. If you're getting this for a younger kid in the 9-11 age range, you might want to use this game to have a discussion about actions and consequences with them while they play. (I also see that multiple reviewers have mentioned the so-called "genocide" or "no mercy" route, where the player kills absolutely everything and the story becomes extremely dark and bleak. Rest assured that this route is near impossible to access unintentionally, especially towards the end of it, where a younger player would likely get bored of the sheer repetitiveness of the gameplay at that point.) The characters of this game are amazingly well-written. Every single character that you meet has more to them than initially meets the eye. The initially aggressive and threatening character might have a big heart, and become a friend once you get to know her. The bombastic character with a frankly amazing ego might be willing to give up his dreams of stardom for his friends. Even someone that seems irrevocably evil can be saved, if you try hard enough. The characters of Undertale seem like living individuals, and that's where this game shines. As for "satanic" or "disturbing" imagery, nothing about this game is satanic in the slightest. The genocide route mentioned above can get fairly disturbing, but at that point the player has basically asked for it. The only other thing that might be disturbing would be the final battle of the "neutral" run through, where the art style changes dramatically and the main villain breaks the fourth wall a bit (mentioning that he knows the game is a game, etc) which may scare some younger kids, but that is only one fight and it's both heavily stacked in the player's favor and over pretty quickly. (P.S. If you are getting this for a kid, then you will definitely want to pay attention if they decide to Google the game and look at fanart etc. While the game itself is 100% wholesome, the online fandom (while it has calmed down in recent years) can very quickly become not wholesome if you click the wrong links/artists. Please keep in mind however that this is not the actual game, but people on the internet being people on the internet.)