Toby Fox keeps tutorialising mechanics as jokes or in very silly contexts and then paying them off in huge, dramatic ways and I fail to see it coming every time. I struggle to think of other games that so deftly use mechanics as both humour and storytelling device. And the game continues to just be really fun.

Plotwise, the tensions and mysteries that I assumed would simmer for most of the game are already threatening to boil over. The game really feels like it could go anywhere at this point and the two different paths of the story only feed this more, each painting a very different picture of Kris and the player’s relationship to them.

Also I love Susie.

The anniversary stream was very cute but pacifist Sans is just too annoying to fight. I finished that fight from Deltarune chapter three yesterday and that was incredibly difficult but fun but this is just infuriating. Which is, in fairness, very much in character.

Extremely cute little remake. Love to see something like this fit onto an actual NES.

This game continues to be wonderful. Up until the ending chapter three acts as a bit of a fun breather while also catching Susie and the inattentive player up on nature of darkners. I thought that Susie might have been strung along for a bit longer but there are such interesting tensions bubbling in this game now. It doesn’t seem likely that Susie is going to actually want to condemn darkners back to being mere objects and I really have no idea where the divide between Kris and the souls is going to lead.

But I actually started this chapter by continuing from my evil save file from chapter two. My snowgrave save file. I immediately wanted to know how that plotline continued and was handled. Is Berdly actually dead? How much is it going to be actually acknowledged? I suspected that these questions would probably be avoided and maybe only teased further at the end, putting off any closure on those questions into chapter four or five, but it goes even further and doesn’t acknowledge anything. After all, your choices don’t matter!

It is interesting how this handles both the player who is going through these chapter by chapter as the game comes out who knows all the secrets already, but also the theoretical player, a decade from now, divorced from the rabid fan speculation and Youtube videos dissecting every detail, who is simply playing through the finished game. The S-rank quest is much, much more signposted than snowgrave was but contains very obvious allusions to it. For those who have already played the weird route in the second chapter it’s a callback and a warning about what you might have to do in future if you want to keep getting stronger and for those who don’t it’s a strong hint that you missed something the last time around.

It is also interesting how it leads you down the dark path using the context of it being a game within the game. It even leads you in in a very gamey way, with the promise of a reward for clearing levels with the best possible ranking and then locking you into something more explicitly violent, but also more abstracted, than Deltarune itself is. There’s no dialogue, no real characters, just a sword and some enemies. I’ve read someone talking about refusing to use snowgrave but talking themselves into completing Mantle because, hey, it’s only a game and doesn’t seem like it will have further consequences on the plot. And yes, it is of course only a game, just like Deltarune is. And this circles back to the treatment of darkners as not being “real” people. When you’re talking to them as characters in the dark world they certainly seem as real as Susie and Kris, who are of course also not real. They are all just characters in a video game, toys and stories for our amusement. But people feel very strongly about them and are genuinely worried about where the plot is going and what might happen to them. And me? I am very interested.

That said, when I go on to chapter four I don’t think I will continue my evil playthrough first. As Ramb reminds us games are meant to be fun and in my first playthrough of chapter three I was worrying trying to puzzle out what the weird route might be and if I might have locked myself out of it. That only served to blinker me and stop me from giving the chapter the curious exploration that Deltarune rewards so much.