13. deltarune: chapter 5
deltarune chapters 3 and 4 came out just after i moved to washington. i remember spending a lot of time explaining to people, then, why deltarune was important to me. i was part of that generation. my favorites are jade and sollux, if you were wondering.
for a fan of earthbound, homestuck, cucumber quest, helvetica, monster pulse, and wreckboy, Yes, Even Wreckboy, undertale felt like the ultimate piece, the precision-calculated perfect game for me.
that undertale was good enough to itself enter this very particular canon of stories was no surprise, but deltarune, still the result of all those things that made undertale so great but now also backed by undertale itself, couldn't not be as meaningful to me as it is.
that will, hopefully, be the last time i feel the need to explain why i, at 25 years old, am so invested in deltarune. at this point, it doesn't matter whether you were "there" for this era of the internet. if you're not convinced that deltarune is a game of generational quality, it's because you're not paying attention.
deltarune chapter 5 came out shortly after i moved. i had to organize with my roommate, perhaps the 1 bigger deltarune fan than myself i know, how we would do it. i play the switch version, she plays the pc version, so we just agreed to not set foot into each other's spaces that day. it also put a time constraint on me, because i knew she'd finish it in a day, and i knew that, if we were going to talk about it, i'd also have to finish it in a day. deltarune chapter 5 is, like, as long as undertale was. i played the shit out of deltarune chapter 5 that day. here are my thoughts on deltarune chapter 5.
the amount of content here is simply nutso. there is so much to do before even entering the "main" gameplay portion of chapter 5 that i genuinely thought it was going to be some kind of story-only, slice-of-life interlude. then it just kept going and going, and honestly, even though i started to become fatigued - i'm 25 now, and i can't really play video games for 10 hours straight so easily anymore - i never felt like it dragged, ran out of ideas, or exhausted me. quite honestly, i think for the average player, who i imagine would go through it in 3 or 4 sessions, it's probably the perfect length.
it was here, in the game's 5th entry, that i started to think of toby fox as someone who "still has it." undertale came out 11 years ago, and it left such a huge dent on the culture in the following years that i couldn't really blame fox if his more recent work felt stuck in that era. yet here is flowery, immediately interesting, hilarious, and contemporary.
if there was anywhere where fox's writing could be said to feel outdated it would be in how...steven universe it all is. it'll be weird to eventually replay deltarune front to back and have to read again about "the power of fluffy boys" in the early chapters, but even in 2026, when we're all basically doing some flavor of outraged nihilistic antihumor dimes square dark woke post-post-post irony, fox's writing can sometimes come off, in retrospect, as a bit childish. i say "in retrospect" because it works in the moment. even the most cynical player will, while playing the game, enjoy the basic bitch queer teen romance, matpat bait narrative, and white-guy-wearing-a-kimono aesthetics. it's only with some distance that you start to think, just maybe, this shit is all kinda juvenile. if anything, the fact that it's so engaging while you're playing the game speaks to fox's immense ability to command tone and string a player along. he knows just when to lean in, when to drop the bit, when to dwell on a sour note and when to blow right past it.
if, somehow, you read this, and you haven't played deltarune chapter 5 - and i do actually, genuinely, believe not a single person will do that - i'm not going to spoil anything. i'm especially not going to spoil the secret route, which the game calls the "weird route." except to say, wow. i will be thoroughly disappointed if this ends up pulling its punches, but there is no ongoing story right now that i'm more greatly anticipating the conclusion of.