Tag: Deltarune

Essay about Deltarune on Sidequest

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

I recently had the immense pleasure of writing an article about the latest chapters of Deltarune for Sidequest. This piece features some story analysis and theorizing, as well as a personal anecdote about an extremely awkward moment during my job search in my last year of grad school, but it’s mostly about the joys of retro media and the lost art of having fun. Here’s an excerpt…

Nostalgia is a difficult subject to approach. Cultural nostalgia, which often takes the form of a glorified version of an earlier decade, is a hallmark strategy of conservative political movements that attract sympathy by engendering a fantasy of a time when, supposedly, things were better. Nostalgia for childhood media can be fraught as well, especially when we view the more problematic aspects of this media from an adult perspective.

Still, nostalgia has its uses. When approached with care and attention, indulging in nostalgia can be an exercise that facilitates a rediscovery of play. In its celebration of the television and video games of an earlier era, Chapter 3 of Deltarune invites introspection into the aspects of play that a younger version of yourself understood to be “fun.”

You can read the full essay on Sidequest here:
https://sidequest.zone/2025/08/04/deltarune-remembers-how-to-have-fun/

As an aside, my corner of video game fandom spent the month of July going wild for the character Tenna, an anthropomorphic personification of a CRT television who plays a central role in Chapter 3 of Deltarune. Tenna’s status as the Summer 2025 Tumblr Sexyman is partially due to his eye-catching visual design and flashy personality, but I also get the feeling that his near-instant popularity was due to the way he speaks to a particular type of cultural malaise.

As a consequence of the concomitant collapse of social media platforms and the proliferation of AI-generated “content,” everyone is exhausted by the effort it takes to wade through (and compete with) soul-numbing machine slop. What Tenna represents is an era of media that, though it might not have been “good,” was at least intentional. My essay doesn’t touch on specific issues relating to gen-AI, but I was directly inspired to write this piece by the very enthusiastic reception of the recent chapters Deltarune in online creative communities. There’s definitely something interesting going on there culturally, I think.

Escaped Chasm

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Escaped Chasm
https://tuyoki.itch.io/escaped-chasm

Escaped Chasm is a 25-minute dark fantasy adventure game created in RPG Maker with a mix of retro Game Boy graphics and anime-style cutscenes. Originally released in 2019, it’s the first stand-alone project of Temmie Chang, a longtime collaborator of Toby Fox who contributed character designs and graphics to Undertale and Deltarune.

You play as a young teenage “Lonely Girl” who doesn’t leave the house and lives vicariously through her dreams and art. Her parents appear to have gone missing, and she doesn’t know what to do. To make matters worse, she’s tired all the time, and a strange man has started appearing in her house.

Something is seriously wrong, and the Lonely Girl has four days to figure it out and escape. If leaving the house isn’t an option, where can she go? And how can she find the courage to leave?

Escaped Chasm is free to download, and the zip file contains an illustrated guide to the game’s four endings. I get the feeling that most players will probably see the good ending simply by playing the game naturally, but it’s nice to have grimdark alternatives. After unlocking the good ending, the player is able to enter and explore a bonus “developer’s room” that I love with all my heart. It’s fascinating to read Chang’s thoughts about making the game while checking out extra material that fills out a few gaps in the story.

Both Toby Fox and Temmie Chang were fans of and contributors to Homestuck, and it’s possible to see its influence on Escaped Chasm. It’s difficult to summarize Homestuck, but the webcomic begins as a story about four young teenagers who can’t leave their houses because they’re the last remaining survivors of a universe that’s unraveling around them. I get the sense that the Lonely Girl in Escaped Chasm is based on one of the four teenagers in Homestuck, Jade Harley, and it’s probably not a coincidence that she’s found herself in a remarkably similar situation.

Escaped Chasm is like a bridge between Homestuck and Deltarune in its theme of “using art and imagination to escape into another world,” but it’s also very much its own thing. I love Chang’s illustration style and narrative voice, and I admire how she pushes the boundaries of the medium to create a palpable sense of liminality and dread – and of catharsis and joy. Escaped Chasm is atmospheric horror with a (potentially) happy ending, and it’s idiosyncratic and self-indulgent in interesting ways that elevate it above the level of mere pastiche.

Escaped Chasm is a short test project made in preparation for Dweller’s Empty Path (on Itch.io here), a more extensive Game Boy style narrative adventure game. I really enjoyed Escaped Chasm, and I’m looking forward to jumping into Dweller’s Empty Path.

On the Internet, No One Knows You’re (Not) Kris

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

I recently participated in the annual Yuletide fic exchange for small fandoms. More than a thousand people contribute their work to this exchange, in which each participant is anonymously matched with someone who requests a story for one of the fandoms they’ve offered to write for. The person with whom I was matched asked for fic about Deltarune, and they requested “existential horror about free will and the ethics of a player guiding characters with self-awareness.” I’m always up for existential horror, and the recipient’s description of how they view the player-character Kris really vibed with me: “A Weird Kid who’s kinda lonely but not quite knowing how to make friends/not liking many of their options in town before the game starts.”

This prompt inspired me to write a story called “On the Internet No One Knows You’re (Not) Kris,” which is an exploration of Kris’s character within a narrative meta-analysis of the game. You can find it on AO3 (here).

The person who requested the story confessed that they’ve spent countless hours diving down the rabbit hole of Deltarune theories, so I took a plunge into the internet theory maze as well. The game subtly implies that Kris isn’t in full control of their body or personality, and that what’s manipulating them is their SOUL, the red heart that represents them during battle sequences. Many Deltarune theories try to answer the question of who (or what) is controlling Kris’s SOUL. There’s also the issue of what connection Deltarune might have to Undertale, as the two games share the same metaphysics and many of the same characters.

This ended up being my favorite Deltarune theory:
https://theamazingsallyhogan.tumblr.com/post/663249972697907200/great-big-massive-spoilers-under-the-cut-part-1

What this theory posits is that Kris has made a devil’s bargain with their SOUL, exchanging their free will for the power to rescue a childhood friend who mysteriously vanished a few years before the game begins. Although this theory doesn’t explain everything that’s going on in Deltarune – which, after all, has only released its first two chapters – the essay shines light on the characters’ backstory, which is only very briefly alluded to in the game itself.

This theory led me to create an illustration (here) based on the scene from Howl’s Moving Castle in which Howl makes a pact with the fallen star Calcifer, and I drew the comic above about how the ostensible villain of the second chapter of Deltarune might have a radically different view of the concept of free will. I also created an animated illustration (here) of the secondary villain Spamton, but I ultimately decided not to include it with the story. Spamton is bizarrely beloved in a certain corner of Deltarune fandom, but I think it’s probably safe to say that he’s an acquired taste. Still, I had a lot of fun writing Spamton’s dialog in my story. Despite spending far too long on the Deltarune wiki, I regret nothing.