DELTARUNE Lore is Giving Me a Headache

Toby Fox’s newest title, DELTARUNE, is about to receive two more Chapters on the 5th of June, in about a month at the time of writing. Before the release, I wanted to replay through the already-released Chapters, one and two, in order to refresh on everything that happened. When doing that, I made it a point to try and see all possible secrets and play through all the possible run variations, and you know what? I have some complaints. 

To sum up the main narrative so far, in Chapter 1, Kris, our main character, and Susie, the high school bully, were tasked by their teacher, Alphys, to get her some chalk from the closet. When going inside, they notice it’s weirdly dark and empty, but go in regardless. After a few moments inside, they fall down into its Dark World, and meet with a prince born in there, called Ralsei. He tells them about a prophecy of three fighters who will save the world by closing the Dark Fountains opened by the Shining Knight. Then, the three go through an adventure to fight the evil King who took over. Obviously, it’s more convoluted than that, and at some point, Susie becomes a bad guy and goes through a character arc in which she learns to be nice. At the end, we see Kris going into their bed, and then ripping their soul out of their body and pulling out a knife. It’s more complicated than this, but this is the gist of the first Chapter.

Then, in Chapter 2, a new Dark Fountain was opened in the library, and the main villain this time is called Queen, who rules the Cyber World. In this Chapter, something very interesting can happen — there’s an entirely separate route, called the Snowgrave Route by the community, in which you can freeze enemies to death. In this Chapter, not a lot of new information is revealed, except maybe that your actions in the Dark Worlds can actually hurt people in real life and cause harm.

But aside from the main story, there are a lot of hidden elements and connections to Undertale. For example, you can easily miss that the first save point doesn’t show as empty before you use it, but under the name Kris, regardless of the name that you choose at the beginning of the game. I wanted to make it my goal to find all the connections between these hidden things scattered throughout the game and try to conceive a feasible theory about the lore and the world. Problem is — there are too many of those, and all of them are seemingly random. 

Like, if we look at the Man Behind the Tree, I have exactly one question: what the fuck? It does not tie into anything else: the item he gives you, an Egg, does not do anything of importance, but for some reason, the game tracks how many of them you have collected. But let’s put that aside, surely other things do tie into each other, right? Well, no, not really, instead there are about 20 different unrelated things all happening in the same universe. You know how in the overworld you can go talk to Onion, and if you do so in both Chapters, he tells you that he hears a song coming from the sea, and what is this relating to? Why yes, obviously to the one line we got from a completely irrelevant side character (the Boatman) from Undertale! 

So, this was originally supposed to be an article about some DELTARUNE theories I have, but at one point, I noticed how frustrating it is to try to figure out anything about the lore of this game. I really hope we’ll get some answers in Chapters 3 & 4, instead of more questions. I do trust Toby to deliver an amazing experience regardless, but it’s not out of the question that he will just leave us with a cliffhanger and a lot of unexplained things at the end of Chapter 4. Even then, I am super excited for the new Chapters, and I am obviously immediately buying the game once it’s available.