(You checked the time.)
(… It seems to be time for class.)
– DELTARUNE classroom clock
Pass it along: the students at the school where I teach have been telling me how you can pick up Deltarune for free right now. I catch them playing it on their computers brought from home. Certain kids try to hide it while others have it running in plain sight. It’s a morality tale, after all. Nothing to be ashamed of, and certainly school-appropriate. Others scrunch themselves up, faces close to the paper, and sketch characters from the game. Spamton seems to be a favorite, and the intriguing Ralsei (another anagram). It’s almost as if the game were designed with this noodling and doodling in mind: Deltarune is made for the fans and their desire to play and replay, anytime and anyplace, to imitate and reciprocate.
To date, I’ve only played it through once, though I’m planning to revisit it over winter break. There’s still a kid or two pestering me to dig into Deltarune’s side-quests and secrets, but most seem to have moved on to Metroid: Dread and Halo: Infinite. Next to the likes of those heavy hitters, Deltarune hardly stands a chance this holiday season. It seems destined to be forgotten, like the myriad of indie RPGs it so closely resembles, at least superficially. Then again, there’s the fact that the developer offered it up for free. Plainly, Deltarune doesn’t aim to compete with anyone for sales. And following up on the rampant popularity of Undertale, it hardly has to throw elbows to request anyone’s attention. Like public school, it’s free, faintly ubiquitous, and, viewed from as objective a standpoint as possible, mediocre.
Yes. No. Maybe.
Fitting, then, that the game opens in a school. Sort of. There is a character creation section first, where the game abruptly cuts you off with the words which have come to have the status of a cryptic motto: No one can choose who they are in this world.
The player character, Kris, is a human living in a town populated by monsters. Like the protagonist of Undertale, they’ve been adopted by the Moomin-looking Toriel, who walks them to school. Many other characters from the earlier game make their appearances sooner or later–and more, presumably, will do likewise in future chapters. But Deltarune’s connection to its predecessor remains playfully opaque. Sans the skeleton, a newcomer in town, suggests that he’s as tuned-in as ever to the reality of the player behind the controller, sharing winking knowledge of the bigger picture. Like Kris’s status as a human in a town of monsters, though, the nature of continuity here is mysterious.
Alphys, the anime-obsessed royal scientist of Undertale, returns as the hapless teacher of the older kids, while Toriel has the younger grade across the hall. The class tough kid, Susie, shows up late. Like Kris, she’s in need of a partner for the project, so naturally, the two of you join up. What begins as a search for chalk morphs into Deltarune’s first episodic adventure, as the supply closet turns out to lead to the Dark World. There we meet Ralsei, the adorable prince, and Lancer, the annoying yet endearing one. In short, the quest to seal the Dark Fountains and save the world ensues. Could this be the project, after all?
The locker’s lock’s locker is locked.
For all its self-consciously pat plotting, Deltarune’s writing stands out for the wit and humor we’d expect from Undertale’s creator. The music remains winsome and whimsical, the art replete with quirky heart and vitality. What comes as a surprise, though, is how much richer each of these elements grows in conjunction with the evolution of the core gameplay. Like Undertale, bullet-hell mechanics liven up the stereotypical RPG battles, which can be won either by fighting or peacefully dodging and acting without harming the enemy. But this time, right from the character creation and classroom scenes, we know we are not alone. In a subtle but significant shift, battles play out Final Fantasy-style, rather than in the first-person Dragon Quest (or EarthBound) mode of Undertale’s solo adventure.
Questions of morality and free will get foregrounded still more by the introduction of Kris’s party members. Where Ralsei implores mercy, Susie wants to go on a rampage, leaving Kris and the player to choose their approach. Then again, the upshot of either turns out to be the same. At least so far in Chapter 1 & 2, different endings cannot be triggered by consistently choosing mercy or violence, as they were in Undertale. Instead, uncovering secrets, side-quests, and hidden bosses will depend on the dynamics of other sorts of choices.
The relationships that grow up among your party members and with the characters you meet along the way are correspondingly more complex. While Kris remains a silent protagonist, choices of dialogue options and routes of exploration with your companions unlock various bits and pieces of story and character development. Particularly at the end of each chapter, paying homage again to EarthBound, you can choose to take an extended tour of the town of monsters. Easter eggs, ersatz icebergs, and memey cameos lurk there in the warren of dialogue trees, but so far no definitive answers to the questions players will want to ask. What is causing this series of Dark Fountains opening? What happened between Toriel and Asgore, or to the other families in town evincing separation, bereavement, and loss? Who is Kris’s brother Asriel, and when will they be back from college to visit? And most importantly, what’s Papyrus up to?
Remember when you were little…You asked when your horns were going to grow in?So we bought that headband with the little red horns on it.Oh you wore it for months! Whatever happened to it?Kris I need to grade these assignments.Perhaps you should go to bed…?You do not look very well…
The 8-bit Review
Visuals: 6/10
Aside from the handful of eerie and awesome effects around the start and end of the game, gesturing towards the mysteries of character creation and the fourth-wall-breaking power of the Dark Fountains, the visuals are nothing spectacular. Fitting the tone, comfortingly retro, unabashedly in service of the characters and writing–the biggest takeaway from the game’s art is that it is easy for fans to latch onto and to learn to sketch.
Audio: 7/10
I’ll confess I previewed the soundtrack long before actually getting around to playing the game. It makes for an atmospheric and gently inspiring aural backdrop to study or zone out to. But as much as I enjoy this style of music, melodic and nostalgic, shared by Undertale and Deltarune, it gets a little samey and generic this time around. Maybe I need to spend more time with it, but I don’t feel like Deltarune has quite the stand-out tracks or thematic coherence of some others in the same soundtrack field (of hopes and dreams).
Narrative: 9/10
Of all the improvements to the underlying experience carried over into Deltarune, the story has made the greatest strides. Characters come alive immediately in the distinctiveness of their voice, and they develop in largely predictable but nonetheless satisfying and interesting ways over the course of the adventure. While they show different sides of themselves according to the player’s choices, they abide as recognizably real people responding to the bizarre and the banal sides of the world around them. The “vessel” of Kris’s sprite, the generic save-the-world plotline, and the Dark World/Light World setting are all of a piece; juxtaposed against their familiarity, the thematic stakes laid out so far point towards deep and unsettling explorations into the nature of power, control, family, and identity. And all leavened with humor that is unforced, brave, jolly.
Gameplay: 7/10
Tinkering with the core mechanics of the JRPG/bullet-hell battle system, chiefly with the key innovation of a straightforward party system, yields a surprisingly rich twist on the addictive challenge of Undertale’s battles. Secrets, side-quests, and alternate routes reward replaying, while suggesting that players are only scratching the surface of an experience that is far from exhaustively understood, even by its creator. The castle-town-building mechanic in particular, while intriguing, stands in need of further development.
Challenge: 7/10
For a short game–a first playthrough might take only a couple of hours per chapter–Deltarune provides a good balance of difficulty and reward. Exploration is limited in terms of breadth–there are only a handful of different locations so far–but impressive in terms of depth. Those who enjoy a challenge will find it mainly in the invitation to go down the rabbit hole of lore surrounding the game’s relationship to its predecessor.
Accessibility: 9/10
Again, Deltarune’s first couple of chapters are free to download across platforms. They don’t come much more accessible than that! In terms of player experience, no background of familiarity with Undertale’s story or the conventions of its genre-blending is required to get into Deltarune, whose story can stand alone and whose mechanics are simple to pick up. The only caveat, again (again), is that the game is not quite complete as it stands. The sense of some larger, inchoate purpose, repeatedly hinted at in ways sinister and humorous, might put off the player, or might drive them to play more, including Undertale. Which would be no bad thing.
Uniqueness: 7/10
A fun thought experiment: imagine that we had no Undertale first, and all there was was Deltarune. Now, arguably, this larger project is only possible because of the success of its precursor, a sort of proof of concept. On the other hand, the immense, unexpected popularity of Undertale has made it impossible for me, at least, to appreciate Deltarune on its own merits. In ways large and small, it owes its impact to the powerful feels evoked in Undertale’s brilliant, original, albeit rudimentary delivery of a sort of preliminary remix–premix–of the same ideas.
Personal: 8/10
I’ve followed the work of Toby Fox since his ROM-hacking days on EarthBound fan sites. I tuned in to the Undertale Symphony live broadcast, which he conducted in the form of a white dog plush. I taught his work online and in school this past semester, tracing its direct inspiration from EarthBound and holding it up as a worthy successor in its own right to the traditions and cultural myths that the MOTHER series puts into play. But if EarthBound is the Quixote to the chivalric epics of Dragon Quest, and Undertale is a kind of Borges story to the fictions of Final Fantasy, then Deltarune Ch 1 & 2 is a glimpse at a Dostoevsky novel in progress: published episodically, democratic, polyphonic, hopeful, and a little terrifying in its portrayal of human possibility. I’ll be ready to regard it as a masterpiece once the rest is released, if it ever is completed. Until then, I’d say, let’s stay in school.
Aggregated Score: 7.5
Wesley Schantz coordinates the Video Game Academy, writes about books and video games, and teaches in Spokane, WA.
