Deltarune continues to be absolutely stunning. Hilarious, tragic, challenging and effortless. Had me giggling like a fool as much as it had me in tears. The scenes with Susie and Noelle were delightful and Ralsei’s growth in this chapter was particularly lovely to witness, while the strength of Kris’ dissociation and dread that bookends the chapter hang over everything in a delightfully terrible manner.

The new gameplay systems were delightful and the entire sequence building up to the final boss was enrapturing and I love how it’s also used to the $!$? Squad’s growing independence. I only wish there was more challenge with them, though with climbing from the previous chapter making a return perhaps that will built on in future as well.

Nostalgia for both Undertale and the early parts of Deltarune itself are both played really hard here that’s in wonderful tension with everything hanging over the party and makes me very curious about what comes next, especially with the newsletter calling this “let’s have one more fun adventure.”

The rest of this is going to weave between thematic analysis and crank theoryposting:

In chapter four the most obvious potential twist would be that Noelle, not Susie, is really meant to be the girl mentioned in the prophecy. Ralsei, after all, said that ribbons were meant to be worn by Susie, who refuses to wear them (though she does acquiesce to this in chapter five). Presumably Ralsei’s understanding is that the ribbons are for “the girl”, a role that Susie might not be suited for. I thought that perhaps this might also be such an obvious twist as to distract from other potential reinterpretations of the intended heroes of the prophecy, such as the vessel that one creates on making a new save file, rather than Kris, being “the cage, with human soul and parts.”

The implementation of achievements in the Playstation version of the game (of all things) lends credence to the notion that, while the words of the prophecy must be fulfilled, there may multiple ways of fulfilling them, and that the game’s advertised “one ending” might have a strong degree of flexibility to it. Perhaps characters’ roles in the prophecy are not just going to be used as narrative twist, but something that might be changeable depending on player action? And perhaps the girl might be a third person entirely. It would be cruel, after all, at this point, for the story to insist that Ralsei must stick to their defined role

There is such interesting thematic contradictions in this game. One cannot live in fantasy or turn back time. As fun as the dark worlds are, as delightful as all these little weirdos we meet are, they can only dream for short while while their stories are being told. To try to hold on to them forever will only invite disaster: The Roaring, or at least obsessively arguing with people on Tumblr about headcanons forever and making oneself miserable. But at the same time we do love these little weirdos and we want to see their dreams. Ralsei, the fictional character, does exist purely to fill a role in a story, but Ralsei, the darkner, hates their role in the story and themself and they do not want to be bound by prophecy where they are the prince with the weight of the world on their shoulders. Deltarune gives us a wonderful fantasy world and beats us over the head with the fact that we cannot live there, that the dark world cannot last and its food does not nourish, but we still want to see these characters’ dreams. And surely we must hope that Deltarune is not too cruel as to at least let Ralsei be a princess before the end, even if there must a prince.

So maybe Ralsei can be the girl? Even if the girl’s fate is a tragedy, too. Maybe “no one can choose who they are in this world,” but perhaps we can still choose what our story is, even if that story has to come to an end eventually.

On the more crank side of talking about Ralsei: What are they in the light world? They presumably must correspond to some sort of object, but they can move freely between all the different dark worlds, which suggests a physical presence in different places in the light world (though Spamtom also moves around, somehow). People have suggested that Ralsei is something that Kris carries around with them, but they can be seen in the Castle Town with Susie at the end of chapter five and nothing in Kris’ light world inventory screen is suggestive of them. My tinfoil hat theory is that they are traces of Asriel’s fur scattered around his old haunts and Ralsei can be present anywhere that still has lingering trances of Kris’ brother. If a dark world is opened somewhere Asriel has never been then Ralsei will not be able to go there.

And one other question that hangs over the story: What is in the shelter? Most speculation I have seen in this direction assumes something sinister and terrifying, that there must be some horrible secret buried there. But this is Deltarune: What’s in there is not going to make you scream, it’s going to make you cry. I think it’s a very old dark world, Home from Undertale to Castle Town’s New Home, full of little weirdos who will welcome you with open arms and delighted to meet new lightners, with the bittersweet tragedy that you’re there to seal them away. Specifically I think it is Asriel and December’s old dark world perhaps left there from when they refused to fulfil the prophecy themselves when they were younger and seal it away. Refusing to let the story end and inviting disaster on everything instead.

Going further with this: Perhaps they even somehow deliberately made Ralsei as a guide for next set of heroes to try and fulfil the prophecy while steering them away from their dark world, carving out an exception for themselves. Des never left the dark world, Asriel moved on. Perhaps Kris was in the original party too, they’re certainly in on whatever’s going on in the shelter now at least.

As one last thing I’ve seen people connecting Seam saying that shadow crystals are made of broken dreams with Noelle saying “the dream never happened” on the aborted B-side, which makes me wonder if there might be a tertiary route for creating more shadow crystals by shattering people’s dreams.

I previously posted lists I’ve made picking one game and one film per year since 1990. 1990 acted as a good arbitrary stopping point as it’s a nice round number, it’s the year I was born and the number of games I’ve played at all from before then is pretty small, and it would be be fairly difficult to pick out shows for each year before then for me too. I’ve made a dedicated page on the site for these picks, made a few substitutions, added a pick for each for 2025 and added one series of television per year as well. All put into one table with the ability to toggle off which media you want to see selections for as well as some dynamic rearrangement based on screenspace, all done with (a horrendous mess of) Cascading Style Sheets and no Javascript.

These are not necessarily my favourite from each year. I have tried to be deliberate to give a spread of different styles and series I like as well including some weirder picks. Especially with games I spent a lot of time weighing choices for particular years based on what series I wanted to include and some years are just packed with formative games for me. 2001 has Metal Gear Solid 2, Silent Hill 2, Commandos 2 and Halo (and Grand Theft Auto 3 and Advance Wars and Worms World Party…). I eventually gave the year to Metal Gear Solid 2 after weighing up that I could have Resident Evil 2 and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories covering some bases for Silent Hill 2, Shadow Tactics was spiritually taking up a place for the Commandos series and there’s already plenty of shooters there to justify dropping Halo.

Similarly Prey is spiritually covering for System Shock so that I can have a childhood favourite Soleil for 1994 and Half-Life would probably beat out Resident Evil 2 in a head-to-head but there’s already two Half-Life games on there and I wanted it to carry the survival horror water for both the aforementioned Silent Hill 2 and for the REmake that got booted out from the previous iteration to make room for Robot Alchemic Drive. And yes after going on about carefully spreading out my choices I did give three picks to Sonic games, one to another Sonic Team-developed game and two more to Sonic-inspired indie games (and four different series of Doctor Who for the TV list). I will not be taking feedback on this.

Again the page is here and the lists are also on my Letterboxd, Serializd and Backloggd accounts as well as a second Letterboxd list covering the years 1970-1989.

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.

Don’t Forget-Don’t Watch Mr. Beast mashup