DELTARUNE – More Album Than Game

Almost ten years on from UNDERTALE, Toby Fox has graced us with chapters 3 and 4 of DELTARUNE, unlocking full access to the first half of his seven-episode saga. He’s back. It’s a sublimity to return to Toby’s mind. Though I have to admit, I know I’m a tourist here.

I never finished Homestuck, which I started reading in 2020. I played UNDERTALE pretty late, sometime in 2018, but loved it all the same. I played chapter 1 of DELTARUNE in early 2019, a few months after its release, and decided to wait for the whole game to release before continuing. After having fully gulped down four full fat chapters I think it might’ve been better to pace myself.

From the very beginning, Toby reminds you whose hands you're in. He asks you to design a character, to name them, to invest, then immediately discards them. You're not playing your game. You're playing his. This is a designer who’s always loved playing with your assumptions, but here the trick feels more pointed. DELTARUNE isn't about your power. It’s about the illusion of it.

You get dropped into a Saturday morning cartoon town full of all your favourite UNDERTALE characters. Toriel even drives you to school. All your friends wave as you cruise slowly through an unfamiliar picture. It’s here that DELTARUNE reveals itself as connected to UNDERTALE, and I’ll admit, I felt a twinge of disappointment. UNDERTALE felt so complete. I didn’t want to see these characters again outside of that good ending, I didn’t want them to lose the happiness we’d earnt together.

But I do know what it’s like to want more. To crave the marrow of an artist’s world. To want to live inside it a little longer because it fits you just right. So I get it. I'm happy for the people who never left.

The game quickly reverts to familiar shapes: you enter the dark world and suddenly it looks like UNDERTALE again. You can run now, as if being told, you’ve done this before, go ahead and skip a little. You’re funneled through a corridor, dropping into pits, chasing the ghost of a game you've seen before. The big difference is that this time, you have a party. 

Susie and Ralsei are a perfect angel and devil on your shoulder. Susie seeks validation through force. Ralsei just wants everyone to have a good time. And yeah, I also want to have a good time. So when Ralsei asks me not to kill anyone, I agree. Let’s be chill guys with these freakazoid monsters. I didn’t kill anyone in UNDERTALE, and I wouldn’t ignore the lessons in mercy I learned there.

I’m not even sure if there's a true pacifist route this time, but I still can't bring myself to risk it. I show everyone mercy. Even when it takes longer. Even when it gets tedious. Because DELTARUNE treats enemies not as obstacles, but as people. And it’s hard to keep seeing people as people when the game makes you fight them ten times.

I wonder sometimes if it's a mistake to be merciful in a world that doesn’t reward it. But maybe that’s the point. Why should I need a reward for doing the right thing?

Still, the combat begins to drag. Unlike traditional JRPGs, where grinding makes you stronger, DELTARUNE keeps things flat. Every enemy takes the same steps to spare. It’s charming in Chapter 1, but by Chapter 4 it becomes rote. Mercy turns into a chore. You’re not being challenged anymore, you're being tested for patience. And that’s the tension: the system asks me to keep being kind, but makes kindness feel mechanical.

Then Chapter 2 hits, and everything comes alive.

From the moment you enter the Cyber World, you can feel it. The punchlines start landing quicker. The mechanics shift constantly. Toby never lets a gimmick linger long enough to wear out its welcome. It’s a magic trick built entirely out of punchlines. The whole thing moves with the rhythm of a great comedy set setup, payoff, transition, escalation. And I’m a big Berdley fan.

And yet, even as I was laughing,I could feel the fatigue building in the background. The combat didn’t evolve. Often I didn’t need all three party members to act. I was still enjoying myself, but I was starting to see the bones under the costume.

Then Chapter 3 arrived and to go against what seems to be public opinion this one was my favourite. It did constantly switch up the game play, nothing lingered too long and remained pleasantly  But I loved it. Tenna is a perfect one-episode monster. His story is lovingly tragic. If not a little Cartoon Network. The whole chapter plays like a breather. And maybe that’s because I’d stopped caring about the overarching drama.

By the time I hit Chapter 4, I just didn’t want to go back. Days passed. I lingered looking at the launch page on steam. Not because the game was bad but because I was full. DELTARUNE had become a game to finish rather than a treat to savor. It felt like I’d overdosed. I wanted Toby to pace me. To hold something back. To make me wait. But he gave me more than I could eat, and I crammed it all down. And now I feel a little sick.

And going into chapter 4 the game slowed right down. The humour takes a back seat here though never fully disappears and without the humour the game begins to feel much more sombre and it doesn’t work as well. The game works with its reverence in the face of darkness and when it's just darkness it certainly lost me.

The truth is, DELTARUNE excels in its music more than anything else. Just listen to Hip Shop. Or Field of Hopes and Dreams. Or Cyber Battle. UNDERTALE’s story was brilliant, yes, but what lingers, what haunts, is the music. Bergentruckung into ASGORE. MEGALOVANIA. It’s not just background. There's more feeling in any bar in this soundtrack than in any text box. That’s why I say this is more of an album than a game. That makes it unique. How many games are so soundtrack-forward that aren’t rhythm games? The masterful use of leit-motif conjures subconscious memories you didn’t know you had.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the game’s emotional tone often feels adolescent. Not immature, but distinctly adolescent. A Tumblr-aged melodrama of softboys and pastel trauma. Stylised sadness. Beautiful suffering. It feels trapped in tropes loved by fourteen-year-olds that teenage horror of realizing your parents don’t understand you, and maybe no one does. The sentimental gothic of childhood objects being creepy that seems to have been the fashion of those slightly younger than myself.

For some, that aesthetic is catharsis. For me, it’s trite. And maybe that says more about me than the game. But I worry this story might not grow up before I outgrow it.

That said, there are flashes of something deeper. Themes of powerlessness. About being a co-pilot, or a stowaway, inside someone else’s life. About showing mercy not because it’s rewarded, but because you should. About trying to matter in a story that keeps telling you you don’t. A theme that I'm sure will be properly fleshed out in the final product once every component chapter is released.

I’m not an UNDERTALE guy. I’m a visitor. A grateful guest. I won’t be replaying the routes or chasing the super bosses. I don’t want to dissect the timeline or theorycraft Kris's soul. I just want to say thanks. For the ride. For the melodies. For the strange, sad, hilarious dream.

It’s a deep shame how much I’ve mentioned UNDERTALE in a review of a different game but from the name alone, DELTARUNE is built as its anagrammatic sibling. Its alternate universe. It will always live in its shadow. Maybe one day they’ll be seen as a pair. But for now, we’re stuck in the present—where one came first and defined the other.

Toby Fox is a great designer. A sharp writer. A megalithic composer. And most of all a person with a pure heart.

I just wish he’d hire a battle designer.

 

Clair Obscur wears its influences on its beautifully-rendered sleeve, and honestly? Good. Great. Please do.

We are some many millions into this and you are asking them not to take a little from here or use a little from that? At this point, the building blocks look a lot like the other building blocks beneath them, and those before them resemble some others until forever. Every new thing is a memory in cosplay. Every battle system a child of some earlier one, layered like sediment. I’m glad we’re still making this stuff. The Square Enix RPG is alive in the imaginations of many, But Clair Obscur feels... hollow. Pretty, but hollow. Dramatic in that high-gloss, low-impact way. It hits the notes, but doesn’t make music. Melodramatic in a kind of Joss Whedon for poets way like someone’s trying to write a tragic opera on the back of a Funko Pop.

The combat system revolves around this block mechanic that basically turns stat progression into a polite suggestion. All those tiny +0.2% upgrades to poison damage feel like filler. Tired-computer thoughts. I didn’t come here to do Excel sheets in a corset. But if you time a block right? You can survive anything. And that’s cool, I guess. It gives the player real agency but sometimes it also feels like the game doesn’t actually want you to block, just to try to block. To hope. Or maybe I’m just bad. That’s possible too.

It’s a nice game. I don’t mean that in the familial “nice” way, like when your mum says your writing is “interesting.” I mean it’s genuinely quite good at what it does. The voice acting? Some of the best I’ve heard. Story beats? Evolve in some pleasing ways. Everything here is competent but without reverence. There's a lot of love for a lot of art here and sadly I think I knew them all.

And then there’s the reception. The hype. This weird undercurrent that feels like the old anti-Japanese sentiment of the 2000s sneaking in through the back door. Back then it was “Japan’s just weird now,” like weirdness was suddenly out of fashion. Now the narrative seems to be, “Japan’s too old to do what it used to. The torch has passed. The French get it now.” But Clair Obscur isn’t doing anything Square hasn’t done in the last five years it just isn’t called Final Fantasy XVII. The discourse feels like we’re giving bonus points because it’s French, like that somehow makes the melodrama deeper. It doesn’t.

I don’t know. Maybe it caught you at the right time. Maybe you were looking for something, anything, that still looked like this. But all I could feel while playing was the weight of everyone else's excitement pressing down on me. Waiting for the mind-blow. That moment. The snap. The twist. The revelation. But it never came.

Just a lot of good intentions.

And some lovely clouds.

A conversation about Death Stranding written, directed and posted by Kinbur.

I’m not sure I’ve ever touched a game that turned hatred into love so expertly and on purpose.
Sure, weirdo, you loved the feeling of arduous helplessness found in Chapter 2. You luxuriated in its laborious fetch quests while the driving story begged you to move forward.
I almost quit just before Chapter 3. I’m glad I didn’t.

The game feels so stifling at first. Walking is a chore, that thing which is usually an unthinking reflex in most games now constitutes your every thought. The driving force in an open world game is so often “”What happens when I get there?” Here it becomes: “How am I gonna get there?”

The first two chapters ,after tone setting hours long cutscenes conclude, just had me thinking “do I even wanna get there?”

Those early game obstacles are something any video game character would simply walk over easily and feel trivial to any long time game player. Then if you just take a second to calm down and realise what the game is trying to get you to do. Most games are about overcoming obstacles as an individual and oftentimes a single time. Death Stranding shows you the power in overcoming obstacles together, considering those who might walk your road after you’ve moved on.

This rewiring of the player's mind is a magic trick. The deliveries become akin to meditation once you learn to properly prostrate yourself and just get to going. Then there's a moment at the close of chapter 2 when you are free to run down a hill while the song ‘Asylums for the Feeling’ swells and the joy of the journey comes to the fore. I don’t think a game has ever conveyed that feeling of finally arriving at the decline after cresting a hill before. The relief that gravity will begin to help rather than hinder.

The destinations in Death Stranding are frankly boring, like Muzak overtly corporate and underdesigned. Everything is a grey box I would like to leave immediately. No matter how dangerous the outside world is, these private rooms found at distribution centres feel like I fell into my coffin too early. These are unexciting locations to set your compass to and then spend a none insignificant amount of time pushing the left analogue stick forward watching the distance number drop at a hopefully consistent rate. When you arrive the blue holographic menus fill your screen and it throws numbers at you like you’re looking at Google Sheets from tomorrow. I don’t think calling the depiction of this world’s civilisation boring is a criticism though. I think it's bravely on purpose.

Soon you’ll find that every person you deliver to is a Creative of some kind. An artist, a film director, a craftsman but where are their creations? Death Stranding’s America is spartan; the plot dictates there is no room for design in this world of people hanging on. Eventually in the back half of the game when you meet Nicholas Winding Refn’s Heartman and you’re invited into his home. The room is covered in bookshelves of art from the past. The collectables are films, soundtracks or motorbikes from our real world. This is a world where people stop making new stuff and just subsist on the old. A world I feel like we could be fast approaching.
I was considering recently on if I could actually afford all the media I consume. All the music my Spotify feeds me for a frankly ludicrously low monthly fee for access to their sonic buffet where my stomach for music can only get as full as there are hours in the day. All the tv and films on streaming services and the forever games. Affording with money is one thing, affording with time another. When time is the currency the transaction is consumption for creation. Time spent in the world of another vs time spent in my own. We have such unlimited access to media and more and more is being produced and everything has a sell by date of the hype conversation around it. It's getting easier and easier to spend all my currency on consumption.

When the game sits you down in its private rooms, you can’t even move Normus Reedus; everything is done by cutscene. There's this detachment between player and Reedus. You aren’t playing as Norman, you're directing him. Wishing him luck on his journey. Yes, I think it's normal to pretty quickly skip the 4 or so cutscenes that make up taking a shower, but what would we have missed if they skipped it for us. That's some serious commitment to transcribing the mundane that, ignoring indie, video games are allergic to. Death Stranding begs you to imagine living in this world. Imagine how taking a shower would feel. It’s a surprise the game doesn’t ask you to make sure he’s fed. He takes care of that himself. For the hiking gameplay to truly hit you have to want to protect your Norman Reedus like a Tamagotchi. You take him to the toilet when he needs to go and you take care of him when falls down a ravine. The way he soothes BB makes you want to soothe him when he finally catches a break. Norman is so human-like you feel bad when you walk him off a cliff. He talks to himself like how your internal monologue talks to yourself when playing the game. You want him to succeed. Nothing in this game feels like I did it. Norman did it. The human actor. He's not bombastic with his performance at all nor do I think hes understated. He’s just reflecting this world like a person.

So you keep delivering, and you feel the warmth of a faceless other as you cross their ladder. They planted a tree for you to enjoy the shade and it’d be rude not to. It feels like torrenting in a way, though I will never meet my peers. It would be impolite to those that seeded my download to not seed those that come after. The Genes and Memes of MGS are represented here in gameplay. I do feel reconnected to the world through these tendrils of communication, in a language Kojima has only just taught me. The other message imparted onto Raiden from Snake at the end of MGS2 “Building the future and keeping the past alive are one and the same thing.” When I drove back and forth from distribution centers to auto-pavers dropping tonnes of metal into them I thought not only of my future endeavours but of the shade these roads would give to players who came after me. We build these roads, ladders, bridges not to meet anyone, but so no one else has to struggle the way we did. It’s a form of care without the vulnerability of being seen. That’s what Death Stranding offers: a way to love anonymously. The showering of likes from a thousand unmemorable steam names for your forgotten ladder. Sometimes I wonder if that’s the kind of connection I’m most comfortable with. One that doesn’t risk rejection, or disappointment. Just utility. “I helped you. Please don’t ask me about it.”

Those boss fights are the weakest part though. It feels somewhat like publisher meddling that they are so detached from what Death Stranding wants to be. Higgs even says as much when he leans on the fourth wall asking Reedus isn’t this what you were waiting for during the first set piece action segment. The loadout mechanic is so central to every mission, balancing equipment with the packages you’re delivering to make a man that won’t topple with the slightest slip on a slick pebble. Then the story comes along and demands you fight something, the whole loadout mechanic just disappears and white dripping men start throwing items at you. Literally. The game’s real bosses are the toughest hikes. The areas around Mountain Knot City in the snowy mountain ranges. The game asks you to use all the various tools you’ve acquired from the gameplay to overcome a grand obstacle. That’s a real boss in the context of Death Stranding. However, also in these geographic bosses is the largest flaw in Death Stranding’s gameplay: it's pretty lenient. As long as you’re white-knuckle grasping your backpack straps like it's the first day of year 7 and you press Norman Reedus’ face into the mountain’s face you will, like a Skyrim horse, eventually surmount that igneous impediment.

The game is surprisingly easy. It’s difficult to die and when you do you pretty much just go back to where you are. The BTs are effortless to dodge once you realise you just have to crouch. The difficulty comes from endurance. Which isn't hard because once it clicks, the game becomes an addictive joy. And there hides the true difficulty: How far can you push Norman Reedus...before you just want to let him go to bed?


Kojima himself has already talked about this in the run up to Death Stranding 2, but the connections that Reedus is forging between these cities are hollow. Norman himself thinks it's hollow; he doesn't care about it. He does it because he’s told to. We all do things we’re told to because it's often easier than doing things we weren't told to.

As we saw during the last pandemic even if we’re all connected online that doesn’t fulfill the human need for connection. Turns out humans being animals need proximity to not feel lonely. Remote conversation is a pale ghost compared to the natural warmth of a friend’s smile. There’s a futility to the goal. You know it's the best they can do. It’s noble and tragic.

The story is hilarious. I love it. It’s also quite affecting. Kojima’s writing is back in full force, and I’m hard on the side of loving names like Deadman and Die Hardman. These actors do such a wonderful job that it feels like drinking cold water for the first time in my life after 25 years of bad video game acting. I always assumed acting on this level was a technological impossibility but maybe nobody had hired Mads Mikkelson yet.

The cities of America have been defamiliarised from Washington DC to Capital Knot City. I’m not American like Kojima but am well aware of the American lordship and cultural dominance that rules over our respective nations. I can name every state and some of their capitals (thanks Wakko) but this was useless here. I know that Kojima knows the name of Chicago but here he obfuscates it under heavy Death Stranding theming and it's now called Lake Knot City. America isn’t really important in this game about America. America is the international stand in for INSERT COUNTRY HERE. The game could be set in any country, any society needs to be connected, not just america. Why didn’t he set it in Iceland? He clearly wanted to. America works here because we all grew up in its media. Hollywood is a second home to all. Setting the game in Japan would make it to non-Japanese people “A Japan Game”. The notion of setting would create stereotypes in players minds. America is international. Anyone in the world who's seen a Marvel Movie can set their mind to American and think this is all pretty normal.

Nothing about Death Stranding is American apart from Reedus’ passport. Half the actors don’t even have American accents. The setting is arbitrary and yet I do want to help reconnect those cities. I’m forever the provincial of that great American Empire. However, It's also a masterstroke of clearing away the clutter of setting from tone. Going all the way back to MGS2 Snake tells Raiden who is the representation of a game player “Don’t obsess over words so much, find the meaning behind the words then decide.” Death Stranding throws jargon at you like you’re a glutton and then asks you to ignore it and instead consider what it means. It gently demands you siphon the signal from the noise. Often times a game’s themes are found in it’s story, the cutscenes when you put the controller down and the gameplay fills the time for you to feel justified in your £50 purchase. In death stranding the meaning is found in the gameplay

Kojima is curiously otaku in his work when he’s known as an auteur. It's not so much that his love of setting is box ticking for a sci-fi world but that he loves both signal and noise. It's the picture of a fully complete human reflected in his work. He’s the kind of guy who buys the jacket from Drive. As a writer Kojima wants to make you laugh, wants to make you cry. He just wants you to feel something and not every emotional beat lands and some jokes make you want to yell but at the end of the day does any other AAA game even come close to feeling like a product from an actual human like this one does?

I’m quite terrible for listening to music while playing games. Especially the open world kind of game where you spend more time washing a world’s windows than having fun. I went into Death Stranding thinking it’d be one of those however the sound design is so fulfilling on its own not once did I have the need to tab out and seek entertainment elsewhere. I eagerly awaited each time for those white words to appear on the screen to introduce the next song from Low Roar. Such a perfect accompaniment to the visuals and the tactility of the game.

Just before I played Death Stranding I went to Japan for a month. I moved across Japan going from city to city with a large bag strapped to my bag that made walking ever so slightly more difficult than I’d have liked. I was in these various Japanese cities for 2 days at a time. After a day of walking around I’d retire to what was at the time of booking the cheapest hotel room in said city. It’s astounding how similar they all were; especially the bathrooms, all the same curved white plastic.(Show a scene of the private rooms here.)
I didn’t speak the language and was terrified that someone might try and speak to me, connect with me, and I would be unable to respond. Social asemphosmphobia.
Just before I played Death Stranding I climbed Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh with a backpack. At one point the weight of said backpack almost made me fall. Then, I came home without a job so I just holed up in my room playing old games and watching old films.

So I know something about what it's like living in Death Stranding’s universe, and that's saying nothing about when during COVID I worked through the whole thing as part of the delivery chain at TESCO (I was the guy at the distribution center loading Norman Reedus’ van). That perpetual motion of travel for an extended period of time. How hard it is to form connections when you’re in a state of impermanence. Yes it wasn't the apocalypse (maybe my own personal apocalypse but we can talk about that later) but I know something about being a porter. Death Stranding tells the story of touching others through bubble wrap. You can feel their form but you can’t discern their features. That frustrating feeling when you feel transient in your own life. When you gotta keep moving forward because you don’t know what you’re going to do when you stop.

IRL I’m a self-professed journey enjoyer, but in games I’m a destination addict. So this one was a hard sell for me. I might be 6 years late to this conversation and I don’t have a PS5 to play Death Stranding 2 so I had to live in the past.

I walked across a country.
For a purpose I’m not sure I believed in.
I hauled bags of needless junk across foreign landscapes.
I fell down.
I got up again.
I pressed the left stick forward
and I meant it.
And somewhere out there…
maybe someone else used my road.
That’s enough.