Deltarune

• 1. Introduction

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  Deltarune began as a fever dream. In 2011, while Toby Fox was in college, he saw the ending of a video game in his sleep and resolved to build it. The result is an episodic role-playing game from the American indie developer, set in a parallel universe to his 2015 game, Undertale. Its hero is a teenager named Kris, and the player's relationship to Kris turns out to be central to the story's mystery.

  A handful of questions carry this documentary forward. How does a school group project send two classmates into a hidden realm? Who is really steering Kris, and what do the villains actually want? Why did a game conceived in 2011 take so long to reach a full release? And why did critics who expected an echo of Undertale describe something with an identity of its own?

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• 2. Into the Dark World

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  A voice opens Deltarune by asking the player to design a character. It then throws the design away, explaining that "no one can choose who they are in this world". Control passes to a human teenager, Kris Dreemurr, who arrives at school late and is paired with a delinquent monster classmate named Susie for a group project.

  Their teacher, Alphys, sends the pair to fetch supplies. The closet shuts behind them, and they tumble into a strange realm called the Dark World. A dark prince named Ralsei greets them with news of a prophecy. According to him, he, Kris, and Susie are heroes destined to close the Dark Fountains, geyser-like sources that give form to every Dark World.

  The most unsettling discovery comes after the first Fountain is sealed. Kris and Susie wake in an unused classroom filled with objects that resemble the characters they just met. The suggestion is that each Dark World reflects an ordinary room in the ordinary world, which the game calls the Light World. Its inhabitants, called Darkners, are simply objects in that room.

  The second chapter builds on the idea. Ralsei tells the pair to carry the classroom's objects into the closet, which restores them to their Darkner forms. His prophecy, however, will prove to have more pages than he first admits.

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• 3. Rulers of the Dark

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  King, the tyrant of the first new Dark World, rules alongside his son Lancer. Susie has no patience for prophecy and starts out fighting beside Lancer against Kris and Ralsei. Both are soon persuaded to change sides and join the party. Lancer still cannot bring himself to confront his father or watch his new friends get hurt, so he locks them in King's dungeon. Susie frees Kris and Ralsei, fights Lancer, and then makes peace with him, promising not to hurt King. The party defeats King anyway, and he remains unrepentant.

  Queen appears in Chapter 2 as a computer who rules a newly made Dark World inside the library's computer lab. Classmates Noelle and Berdly are drawn into the group project, and Queen recruits Berdly and tries to recruit Noelle. Kris helps Noelle dodge those attempts. After Queen captures everyone, Kris and Susie escape and persuade Berdly to switch sides.

  Queen then reveals that an entity called the Roaring Knight created her Fountain. She plans to force Noelle to open one, which any inhabitant of the Light World can do. A giant mech does not save her, because the party makes her realize her error. Berdly then tries to create a Fountain himself, and Ralsei warns that opening too many would cause an apocalyptic Roaring. Kris closes the Fountain, and Noelle and Berdly later dismiss the whole adventure as a dream.

  Tenna is a Darkner formed from Toriel's television, and he treats the party like contestants. He casts Kris, Susie, and Ralsei in game show segments, then holds Toriel hostage inside a giant toy capsule. He refuses to stop because he feels abandoned and obsolete, and the Roaring Knight has promised him relevance if he keeps the Fountain open. After the party beats him, Susie comforts him. She points out that he has spent years bringing joy and could find love and appreciation in another household.

  The Knight itself arrives at that moment, attacking Tenna and trying to capture Toriel. The party fights the Knight and loses, saved only by the police officer Undyne, whom the Knight then kidnaps. Kris and Susie chase it through the Light World to a locked bunker that seems to hold a Dark Fountain. The entrance shuts before they can go in, and its lock demands three numeric codes. Susie runs home to rescue Toriel, and the chapter ends as the bunker door opens in front of Kris.

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• 4. The Soul and Snowgrave

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  On the night after the first Dark World, Kris pulls out their own soul, which the player still controls, locks it away, and draws a knife. The pattern repeats after the library adventure. Kris secretly removes the soul again, locks it in the bathroom, and briefly leaves the house off-screen. Toriel later finds her car tires slashed and calls the police. Once everyone has fallen asleep, Kris stabs the living room floor with the knife and creates a Dark Fountain. Tenna's world, in other words, exists because of Kris.

  The hunt for the bunker's codes in Chapter 4 leads to Noelle's mother, Mayor Carol Holiday. In the bedroom of Noelle's missing sister, December, Kris finds a code inside a guitar but rips out the soul before it can be fully read. The soul crawls into the house's ventilation and finds Kris on the phone with an unknown person. The voice discusses the Knight's actions and tells Kris to keep Susie away from the guitar. Kris fails, but Carol comes home and expels Susie before she can memorize the code.

  Ralsei, meanwhile, is concealing something of his own. When the church turns into a Dark World covered in depictions of the prophecy, he admits that he has hidden parts of it because the truth would upset them. There the party meets an old man formed from the ashes of Gerson Boom, a dead inhabitant of the Light World. The Knight opens a Fountain that produces a Titan, a harbinger of the Roaring, and the party defeats it with Gerson's help. Against Ralsei's protests, Susie runs ahead and sees the ending of the prophecy. She smashes it before the player can see it, dismissing it as something the party would never let happen.

  Back home, the party finds Toriel drunk with the grocery store janitor, Sans. Susie leaves, and Kris receives a phone call from an unknown source. The call refers to a promise between the caller and Kris that was made off-screen, without the player's knowledge.

  An optional route in Chapter 2, commonly called Snowgrave or the weird route, shows how far the player's influence can go. The player backtracks and forces Noelle to freeze every enemy. Spamton, a spambot from an optional sidequest that leads to a secret boss fight, sells Noelle the powerful Thorn Ring. During the battle with Berdly, the player orders her to cast her new spell, Snowgrave. She resists at first, then freezes Berdly whole. Shaken by her own act, she is too exhausted to join Queen's plans.

  Ralsei warns Queen about the Roaring in advance, which cancels her battle. Spamton seizes Queen's mansion and tries to stop Kris, but Noelle freezes him as the Fountain is sealed. In the Light World, Berdly lies in a coma, and Noelle wonders whether the Dark World was really a dream. Chapter 2 then ends exactly as it does on the normal route, with Kris opening a Dark Fountain.

  Chapter 4 pays this route off. Noelle asks Kris to talk privately, and the soul in the ventilation overhears that Kris took Berdly to the hospital before visiting her. Kris had told her the Dark World was a dream and removed a thorn from her hand, which is the Thorn Ring's form in the Light World. The soul then enters the room, takes control of Kris, and tells Noelle that it can read her thoughts and that the events really happened. It forces the thorn back into her. Kris furiously throws the soul into a trash can and beats it, until Carol orders everyone out of the house. The chapter otherwise continues mostly unchanged. At the end, Carol leaves a phone message telling Kris that Noelle is looking forward to seeing them at the festival tomorrow.

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• 5. Bullets and Choices

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  Deltarune plays from a top-down perspective, with a party of characters that the player directs in battle. In the overworld, the player solves puzzles, collects items, and talks to characters. Unlike Undertale, the game has no random encounters. Enemies are visible in the environment, so the player can avoid a fight or start one deliberately.

  Combat is turn-based, and each turn offers five choices: fight, act, item, spare, and defend. The player steers a heart-shaped soul inside a fixed area and dodges enemy attacks that arrive as bullets. The exact mechanics are sometimes unique to each enemy. Defending, or "grazing" an attack by letting it pass close to the heart without a hit, raises the tension points gauge, known as TP. That gauge lets party members use spells and particular acts. Ralsei, for instance, can pacify tired enemies with a spell.

  Acts and spells let the player spare enemies without violence, as in Undertale. Fighting also raises TP and can defeat an enemy violently, which restores health to party members once the battle ends. In the second chapter, the peaceful route gained a new reward, because spared enemies can be recruited to live in the player's Castle Town.

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• 6. Faces and Sounds

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  Susie began as a nice and cute character. Toby Fox came up with her design after playing Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, and he first based her on Maya Fey. As her creation progressed, she turned into more of a thug. Ralsei's name comes from Ralse, a character in an uncompleted RPG Maker game that Fox's oldest brother made as a child.

  Temmie Chang, who had helped Fox with character art in Undertale, is the main artist on Deltarune. For a Chapter 2 miniboss, Fox asked the artist Nelnal to design a musical enemy, and Nelnal came back with three characters. Fox could not choose among them, so he put all three in one battle against three enemies. That battle became Sweet Cap'n Cakes.

  Spamton nearly missed his audience. Fox doubted anyone but himself would like the character, since some test players found him scary and disliked the design. Spamton became popular, and merchandise featuring him sold out quickly.

  Tenna followed a rockier path. Fox first meant to build a 3D model himself, and in 2016 he bought a Kinect to rotoscope the animation, which drew on MikuMikuDance moves. He pictured a lineless 3D style inspired by Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, but scrapped it because he thought it looked "tremendously bad". Chelsea Saunders, who had worked on promotional material for Undertale, eventually made the model with help from Fox and other collaborators, including SmallBü. Fox feared players would see Tenna as a budget Spamton, and he says he is glad they enjoyed the character anyway.

  Fox is also the main composer. The score mixes new leitmotifs written for Deltarune with leitmotifs from the Undertale soundtrack. Each chapter arrives with its own soundtrack album, and guests have included Laura Shigihara, Lena Raine, Marcy Nabors, and Itoki Hana. Every album is published under Materia Collective.

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• 7. A Long Road

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  Development began in 2012 but was abandoned before Fox had made even the first room. Several factors made the project harder than Undertale: the graphics, an overhauled combat system, and Fox's mental state. After Chapter 4, he compared the scope of each chapter to a full game and described the first four chapters as the equivalent of "two and a half Undertales".

  The game runs on GameMaker Studio 2. Its battle system is comparable to the one in the Final Fantasy franchise, whereas Undertale's combat resembled the Mother and Touhou Project series. In May 2020, as work on Chapter 2 began, Fox experimented with other game engines. He concluded that GameMaker "still felt like the best fit for the project".

  On the 31st of October 2018, a day after teasing something related to Undertale, Fox released Chapter 1 for free. It was initially disguised as a survey program, and he described it as a game meant for people who had finished Undertale. His first plan was to sell all later chapters as a single package. Because he envisioned a project larger than Undertale, he said he needed a team, since finishing with only himself and Temmie Chang would be impossible. A Nintendo Direct earlier in the month announced the Switch and PlayStation 4 version, which arrived on the 28th of February 2019, developed and published by 8-4.

  In September 2021, during a livestream marking Undertale's sixth anniversary, Fox announced that Chapter 2 would arrive free on Windows and macOS two days later, on the 17th of September. His blog explained that the pandemic had made the world "really tough for everybody recently". The Switch and PlayStation 4 versions gained Chapter 2 on the 23rd of September, alongside that day's Nintendo Direct.

  The third, fourth, and fifth chapters were first planned as a single paid title, and by 2022 work on all three ran simultaneously. In September 2023, a version of Chapter 3 that could be played from beginning to end was finished. Because development kept stretching, Fox announced the following month that the paid release would include only Chapters 3 and 4. Robert Sephazon joined as producer at the start of 2024, and the team set an internal deadline of the 1st of September for the main work on Chapter 4, which they met. By then, wrist problems meant Fox entered text with speech-to-text software, while other team members handled the programming.

  Later in 2024, the next two chapters were in localization and console porting, and Chapter 5 had entered production. A third round of Tenna's game show in Chapter 3 was cut to improve pacing. During the April 2025 Nintendo Switch 2 Direct, a paid version was announced as a launch title for that console, dated the 5th of June 2025. On the 9th of May, Fox set the PlayStation 4, Switch, PlayStation 5, and Windows releases for the 4th of June 2025 in the West, and midnight on the 5th of June in Japan.

  The paid release holds the first four chapters, with later chapters planned as free updates. The game's menu lists seven chapters in total. The credits of Chapter 4 promise the next chapter in 2026, and in September 2025, on Undertale's tenth anniversary, Fox said he expected it in the later half of 2026. He also mentioned Chapter 6, where at least one programmer had started on regular enemy bullet patterns. In December 2025, he said progress was going "excellently" and localization had begun, but that releasing the chapter would take "several months".

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• 8. Reception

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  Jason Schreier of Kotaku and Dominic Tarason of Rock Paper Shotgun praised Chapter 1 for refining the elements of Undertale, and Tarason called it "a higher-budget production". Mitchell Parton of Nintendo World Report felt it did not "significantly change up the formula", but he did not mind. Mitch Vogel of Nintendo Life was cooler. After how fresh Undertale had felt at release, he was disappointed that the chapter delivered more of the same.

  Opinions on sound and art were mostly warm. Schreier said the soundtrack alone should be a selling point, and Adam Luhrs of RPGFan admired Fox's clever use of motifs. Parton and Tarason liked the pixel art, and Michael Higham of GameSpot praised how much it communicates with so little. Vogel found parts of it plain, and Higham called sequences such as the Card Castle a bit barebones. Allegra Frank of Polygon named the humor as one of the chapter's defining features.

  Screen Rant rated Chapter 2 at 4.5 out of 5, saying its quality matched a full-price game. Ana Diaz of Polygon called its world welcoming despite a harsh challenge. She added that it complicates the moral and ethical questions raised by Undertale.

  The paid release of Chapters 1-4 was also received positively, and OpenCritic recorded a score of 100 percent. Brendan Graeber of IGN called it something incredible that he was not likely to forget. Writing for PCGamer, Diaz described it as a phenomenal expression of Fox's idiosyncratic style. Shaun Cichaki of Vice found the combat more refined and elegant than Undertale's, and Alan Wen of GamesRadar+ saw delightful variety in the encounters. Harold Goldberg of the New York Times called the music remarkably diverse. Vic Hood of TechRadar said the characters began to feel like real friends, though Hood also found some attacks near impossible to avoid on the Nintendo Switch 2 compared with a keyboard. Alisandra Reyes of Game8 found the story deeper and more emotionally resonant but criticized Chapter 3 as a meandering detour.

  The soundtrack was nominated for the Game Audio Network Guild / MAGFest People's Choice Award at the 2019 G.A.N.G. Awards. At the 2025 Golden Joystick Awards, the game was nominated for Best Indie Game - Self Published and Best Soundtrack. It won "Best Game" at the 2025 GameMaker Awards. The demo containing Chapters 1 and 2 drew around 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, far above Undertale's lifetime record. When Chapters 3 and 4 arrived, Deltarune was among the highest-grossing games on Steam. It was also the best-selling digital game on the Switch 2 at launch, ahead of Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour and Mario Kart World.

  Vogel, writing again for Nintendo Life, felt the paid release had answered his earlier complaint by establishing a distinct identity. He called it a worthy follow-up to Undertale. Its unfinished state, he said, left a lingering feeling of dissatisfaction, and only the remaining planned chapters can answer that.

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