Deltarune

toby has some sort of mojo

This review will be updated with time, but as it is, Deltarune Chapters 1 & 2 is/are perhaps the best free game(s) ever made. The quality exceeds UNDERTALE with every note. I think Toby Fox has a chance to make a real triumph here.

I don't know how much I can say about an unfinished game. Whenever the next chapter comes out, I'll update my review. But in the meantime, this game is very charming. Just really sweet, and charming, and silly, and heartwarming. Nicole gives me gender envy. Yeah that's about it, I really enjoy these games for how short they are.

(Review through Chapters 1 & 2)

Toby Fox may never surpass the cultural impact and moral novelty of Undertale, but Deltarune is the better game. The turn-based team combat nicely extends the non-violent options and every fight feels more thoughtfully crafted than any non-boss fight from Undertale.

Chapter 2 is a parade of hilarious character moments that build upon the best parts of Chapter 1. The moment-to-moment gameplay that satirizes the 16-bit minigames of SNES RPGs never falters in quality and never omits an opportunity for characters to shine. Name me one bad character from Chapter 2, it's going to be a short list if it exists at all. The music is still great but just not as memorable as Undertale's best tracks.

Listen to me buddy. This game is fire. it is fuego. the music is good. the graphics are simple and cute. the gameplay is simple and effective, just like undertale, but the party system freshens it up a bit. its even funny sometimes, which is a big achievement not just for indie games but video games in general. i dont hate any of the characters which puts this a peg above undertale too. plus i made great friends bonding over chapter 1.
overall i would give this a 98 out of 100 with 2 points missing because the doe torture in the weird route has given me no end of grief and trepidation as it has caused a certain type of fanart to emerge. and i know toby knew what he was doing. he orchestrates these things on purpose. all i have to do is prove it. but yeah 9 out of 10

(This is specifically for Deltarune Chapter 1)

Toby Fox definitely wouldn't have had an easy time at all, following up a game like Undertale, and not just in terms of having to more or less match the quality of one of the best and most beloved games of the 2010s. Really what makes it difficult to be able to fathom Toby making what's more or less a detached sequel of Undertale is the fact that conceptually it's not something that translates too well to a continuation without feeling as if it's repeating itself. This mainly comes down to the fact that the game hinged so heavily on subverting RPG conventions through humanising its enemies. However, the enemies are already humanised in this, the convention has already been put in place, so the game can no longer have the player question their decisions and rethink the place of even minor antagonists in fiction, maybe even feeling some sense of empathy towards them. With this in mind, it seems like Deltarune was doomed right out of the gate, except, it's actually really great and has some very interesting thematic ties and connections to its predecessor.

It's almost as if Toby Fox saw the potential pitfalls with his questions of morality in this fictional landscape and sought to further challenge these assumptions and have the player think even more about their own actions. The main way this is done is through the constant reinforcement to the player that they don't actually have any big choices to make, that their decisions ultimately don't matter. While this could potentially seem like a direct downgrade and something that undermines any messages the game pushes forth, it also provides an additional caveat and dynamic that makes it a far more interesting thing to ponder. The game no longer requires you to act a certain way in order to go down certain routes and experience all of the game, essentially removing any extrinsic reward for pursuing a particular moral path, instead leaving those decisions all up to the player. This ends up providing a more meaningful choice for the player, as there's no longer an actual reason to spare enemies in this beyond your own desires and beliefs, about how much you care about these characters. This is further reinforced by the fact that whether you fight or attempt to spare, not much actually changes, one way isn't inherently more rewarding or risky than the other, they're just 2 different choices that lead to the same outcome, not even the rewards are any different, it's all about you, the player, and what you feel happiest with.

This of course wouldn't work so well without the top notch writing and characters that one would probably come to expect. You've got a good mix of returning characters and brand new ones that feel right at home with the rest of the cast and yet again bring a lot of colour to the setting to the point where you'll likely be wanting to go around and interact with everything just to get another charming piece of dialogue. It's also pretty interesting in the way that this seems to go even harder into deconstructing and jabbing at common RPG mechanics and ideas. Whether you're looking at having party members join that are actively detrimental, bonus abilities that have no actual benefit, the fact that once again, your choices don't matter, it all feels like a silly celebration of the genre while also supplementing things with some wonderful, unique gameplay. The writing especially works well during certain moments where the game subverts the expectations that it established itself in regards to battle as well, especially with the final boss of the chapter, leading me to believe that future chapters are going to expand upon this idea and bring forth something far more nuanced and thought provoking as well. The world in general just feels like a nicely constructed place, whether it's the overworld or the fantasy land in which most of the game takes place, with a lot of worldbuilding and charm with some hints of something far darker and more surreal going on underneath, with mysterious entities that are never explained and the like adding a lot of intrigue that I'm once again sure will be expanded upon a lot more later down the line.

The combat itself is also really creative, once again having enemy attacks being represented by small bullet hell sequences, but this time feeling as if it plays around with the more meta aspects a lot more to make for some truly inspired obstacles to dodge. A couple of favourites of this include actually having an enemy grab onto the box around your character and moving that instead of attacking you directly, and simulating 3D movement in a 2D environment, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of this kind of insanity in the future. Overall while it can feel like a bit less of a puzzle to actually figure out how to spare your enemies, the mechanical side of things feel much more interesting, especially when considering that this is only the first act of a game before it needs to start escalating in terms of complexity. With that said, the secret boss here also provides some really nice challenge, a great piece of insane optional difficulty to test the player that pulls no punches.

Overall, Deltarune chapter 1 might look like little more than an Undertale clone made by the same developer, but I definitely feel that it's all setting up for a complete sidewinder and that the game as a whole is shaping up to be something to completely destroy one's expectations that were established from the game. I feel like this is the true reason why Toby Fox insists that you play Undertale before checking this out, less for the returning characters or plot continuation, and more for the deconstruction of the themes of that game that have been briefly explored here and likely will be the main focus moving forward. It's rare that I even consider saying something like this, but this is way deeper than it seems on the surface, and if it's anything like what happened with Undertale, things will only get better from this point forward.

----Chapter 2 Section ----

While Deltarune chapter 1 set the stage and began establishing a lot of interesting thematic ties back to Undertale to make it feel like an extremely nuanced beginning to something much greater, Chapter 2 managed to do something even more significant. This significant thing was simply, being an incredible game that improved on almost every front from the first entry to the point where I'm genuinely predicting the full thing to be an even better experience than Undertale itself. It feels like Toby Fox took the aesthetic that he built upon in previous entries and then amplified it by an insane amount, whether it's with the hilarious characters, bringing in every miniscule opportunity to bring out more humour and development to something, and even some really dark themes as well.

I feel like most of what I said about chapter 1 applies here, but it just is on a much larger scale, with more incredible setpieces and an even more compelling theme to the setting. The additions to the cast are welcome across the board, with some of the more prominent ones being especially interesting in how they fit the dynamic of everything else. More worldbuilding is also incorporated in a smooth way that gives some sense of idea of where the story will go from here, and once again there are even some darker, more surreal elements that really make everything feel to be not quite as it seems again. This is particularly clear with a certain piece of optional content that takes all the weird quirkiness up to the max an mixes it with a gleefully demented set of overtones and a badass piece of music to go along with it. While this review is far less in depth and nuanced in terms of what I feel this game represents with its finer details, a lot of that simply comes down to the fact that it would be practically impossible to say anything about it without dropping some massive spoilers in one way or another, so I'll leave it here at least for the time being.

Basically, if you liked Undertale, play Deltarune, if you haven't played Undertale, play it and then play Deltarune! chapter 2 has immediately justified any hype I had in this and is potentially even going to end up being a more impressive game at the rate things are going. Good enough that I ended up finishing basically everything this had to offer in one sitting, which is something that's been happening increasingly rarely, but hey, that just raises the value of this particular one sitting completion after all.