Game Review – Deltarune

               The game Deltarune starts as a very relaxing game. It contains design elements and characters obviously pulled from its predecessor, Undertale, and uses them to build a brand-new story. The game contains beautiful art, music, and story. Even though it is not fully published, each chapter feel like it contains nearly a full game on its own, both building on the story from the previous chapter and creating a new one at the same time. Below the surface level story as presented by dialog, there is yet another, deeper story spanning all the chapters that likely won’t be fully revealed until near the last chapters.

Image retrieved from here. Deltarune copyright Toby Fox.

Image Taken by Ethan Gibson. Copyright Toby Fox.

The engagement that this game plays is wonderful. The four elements of player engagement, as defined by a paper published by Henrik Schoenau-Fog of Aalborg University, are objectives, activities, accomplishments, and affects.
Deltarune contains all these engagement elements. For objectives, the game contains everything from delivering an egg from the dark world to an empty refrigerator on the surface, to the goal of restoring the balance between dark and light in the universe. Very different objectives, but they are both very engaging and require their own work to accomplish. For activities, there are an abundance of activities in Deltarule. There is buying and selling at shops, befriending or killing characters you meet, progressing through the game, forming relationships, and so much more. Each chapter comes with its own list of new and exciting activities.

Screenshot by Ethan Gibson. Copyright Toby Fox.

Accomplishments and affects in Deltarune are more hidden. The game attempts to make a point to the player early on that their accomplishments do not matter. The game attempts to do this by offering to allow you to fully customize your character and their name, giving the character a gift and a favorite item, then stripping that all away and leaving you with what it wants you to have. The game then uses the characters to tell you that nothing matters as well. The problem with this is that, if you pay close attention, your choices do cause changes throughout the game. Your choices can create and destroy relationships between characters, you can kill off a main character in the game, which likely will permanently remove them from future chapters of the game. These choices cause other characters that know nothing about them to react to you differently later in the game. Despite what the game tells you, there is accomplishment and there are affects that the player has on the world around them.

The main shortcoming, I have with the game is that it has taken years for the second chapter of the game to be released. For every chapter of the game that takes years to release the more people slowly forget about the game, despite how great of a story it has.

Screenshot by Ethan Gibson. Copyright Toby Fox.

The strategy to fix this shortcoming is to get an actual team together and start developing the chapters faster. Luckily for me and the other game fans, this has already happened! Part of the reason the second chapter took so long was also the fact that the developer was still solidifying the game idea, so now that he has a development team and a solid idea, the chapters should begin releasing closer together than years apart.