In Chapter 4 of Deltarune, I’m playing as a pixelated character named Kris when I encounter a hallway with a locked door, a step stool, and a bright green book on a shelf. Obviously I need to move the step stool so that Kris, or another party member, can reach the book and hit the switch mechanism I think is hidden behind it. But when I go to move the stool, there’s no button prompt. I cannot do anything no matter how many times I press A. So I move on.
Instead the problem resolves itself later, when Ralsei, one of Deltarune’s three main characters, bends over (imagine a lil pixelated anthropomorphized goat guy on his hands and knees) and offers his body as a step stool. My third party member, a very punk and aggressive purple dinosaur named Suzie, uses Ralsei as a step and jumps up to hit the switch. In the end Ralsei and Suzie end up pancaked on the ground, but they manage to open the door.
For the longest time, videogame logic, a sense of orienting myself honed through decades of experience, has helped me understand how to play games. I see something sparkly, I interact with it. I see an item, I want to try and pick it up. Blocks are made to be moved and fights resolved with careful strategy. But if there is anything that is clear from the recent release of Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 of Deltarune on Steam this week, it’s that this game wants to poke fun at—and defy—every rule of RPG logic.
Classic RPGs, and turn-based RPGs especially, rely on consistency and rules. Battles need to be logical so the game feels fair. If I’m playing Pokémon, it could feel disorienting or plain bad if an attack was strong one turn and weak the next. But somehow Toby Fox, the creator of the subversive and very funny Undertale and new “parallel story” Deltarune, has found a way to challenge this idea. Instead, he and his Deltarune collaborators have created an experience that centers the emotions of its characters, even in the toughest of fights.
Like Undertale, Deltarune combines turn-based battle mechanics with bullet hell-like minigames. You take an action that has some sort of emotional effect on the enemy, and then you guide a tiny pixelated heart through a maelstrom of attacks to avoid damage. The game challenges you to be creative and find pacifist ways to resolve a fight. The options your character has to “ACT” depend on the enemy and context of the game. (I once resolved a fight by using an old, curmudgeonly turtle to shout at the enemies like young rascals.)
While you can memorize tactics for some fights, there’s an erraticism to each and every encounter. Your enemies and allies will talk, chat, cry, scream, and laugh depending on the action you take or the general outcome of events. In one fight an enemy literally edits the UI for the entire battle screen and turns the fight into a roulette-like game using the menus. In another, a character’s fury is so intense that it prompts a dizzying fight that contains five different complete minigames within it. One minute the characters are dodging attacks, the next the three are live on-stage playing a rhythm game.
A lot of the humor of Deltarune comes from playing on expectations and conventions of the RPG genre. At one point, I interacted with a water cooler expecting to get a heal or item, but instead the water cooler fought me and put up a tough fight. During Chapter 3, the three heroes get roped into a live TV game show because a character with a CRT TV as a head is mourning the loss of group family movie and gaming time. The show host, Mr. Ant Tenna forces the party to sit down and play a game seemingly inspired by the original The Legend of Zelda.
At one point while playing this game-inside-a-game, Suzie runs up to the console rendered in pixels and swaps her controller with Kris’. The moment feels goofy, because suddenly I was playing as Kris playing as a tiny Suzie in this weird Zelda-like game in Deltarune. But as with many of Fox’s jokes, there was a point behind it— the scene pushed back against a typical RPG mentality, that Kris is some sort of empty vessel of a character for me to puppeteer.
At the beginning of Deltarune, the game gave me the option to design a hero and name them. However, after entering my preferred characteristics, an omniscient narrator chided me for thinking I could just go and make my own character. After that I met Kris. As I controlled Kris controlling a video game version of Suzie, it reminded me that I, the person playing Deltarune, am not Kris. Kris is not a blank canvas that I can just name and project myself onto, like I would in other games.
If you played Undertale, some of Deltarune’s gimmicks might feel a bit repetitive—characters can only hijack the conversation so many times before I’m no longer charmed or surprised by it. But Deltarune keeps you on your toes. You never know when a fight might turn into a different game, or a water cooler will become a giant monster of death. Fox has more chapters of Deltarune planned, but the first four are already a phenomenal expression of his signature idiosyncratic style and a must-play for RPG-heads.
