Deltarune Chapter 5 is out this week, and it’s pretty dang good. Despite being an absolute sicko for this game, I’ve been engaging in what most would consider a “normal” playthrough. I try to give nice responses to my friends, spare enemies whenever possible, and I absolutely do not partake in anything resembling manipulating my childhood friend’s trauma in order to turn her into a powerful ice cannon that will break the entire game.
Why would anyone do that?
Okay, I tease. But also, I really wanted to talk about what’s going on with Deltarune‘s “Weird Route” and the wild curveball that Chapter 5 throws at players who have fully committed to the game’s darkest timeline. Heads up, folks: I’m going to spoil the Weird Route in Deltarune all the way through its conclusion in Chapter 5, though I won’t spoil anything on the regular route (and the two are very different), so if you’re planning an untainted playthrough, you’re safe to read on:
Deltarune‘s Weird Route is really, really hard to discover and achieve without a guide. It starts in Chapter 2, and requires that you use the character Noelle to slowly freeze every single enemy in the chapter’s Dark World instead of killing or sparing them as normal. It also requires responding to Noelle in increasingly pushy, brutal ways, directing her to brute-force through puzzles and encouraging her to trust and obey Kris (who you are speaking through), and equipping her with an item called the Thorn Ring that enhances her power. If successful, Chapter 2 will end with Noelle freezing Berdly, sending him to the hospital in the Light World. You can then continue the route in Chapter 4 by cutting in on a conversation between Noelle and Kris and forcibly re-equipping Noelle with the Thorn Ring in the Light World, which seemingly creates a connection between you (the player) and her. It’s a harrowing scene, and results in permanent damage to the player’s relationship with Kris.
If you manage to see the Weird Route through all the way into Chapter 5, though, things take an even more terrifying turn. Kris sleeps through the entire festival sequence, and actively seems to fight the player as you drag them out of bed. You eventually meet up with Noelle at the lake, where she delivers an incredible speech about how Kris was able to “change” after their mutual traumatic pasts, while she’s remained stuck in the same routine until now. She begs Kris…or rather, the player…to help her “do something crazy,” and the pair begin slowly walking into the lake together, with the player manically telling them to “Proceed” again and again until the water covers their heads, Noelle screams at you not to stop, and the screen seems to glitch out into white.
You’re then given this ominous screen:
Uh, yikes!!!
That’s it! That’s the chapter for Weird Route players! It’s about 15 minutes long. You never go to the Dark World, never fight any battles, nothing. And from the looks of this screen, it sounds like Weird Route players are fully locked out of the game’s next chapter, Chapter 6, and have to wait until Chapter 7 to even continue their playthrough. What’s more, finishing this sequence forcibly creates save data for the Weird Route, even if you delete or change your save file. This has players speculating that, like Undertale‘s Genocide route, getting this far on the Weird Route might permanently screw up all your save files, making it impossible to get a truly happy ending when the time comes. No one knows for sure yet, though.
There is one last way to bail out, though. When Noelle asks you to tell her to Proceed, you can instead ask her to Stop. At first, it doesn’t seem to have any effect. You eventually are only given the option to tell her to “Proceed” as she walks into the lake with Kris anyway. But when the pairs’ faces start to sink into the lake, stop spamming Proceed. If you succeed, the screen will fade out, Noelle will reflect on how she was wrong and that Kris “hadn’t changed,” and you’ll get a series of scenes that seem to put the game back on the normal route track, interspersed with Noelle cutting in to repeat that “Nothing changed.”
Some fans are speculating that bailing out here will actually put the game on a third track that may be important later. As evidence, they point to a character who can create something called the “Twisted Sword” with the Thorn Ring and a Pure Crystal, the former of which is only obtainable in the Weird Route and the latter of which is only available from beating five secret bosses across five chapters. The fifth secret boss is in Chapter 5, naturally, but you never get to fight it if you go into the lake with Noelle, meaning you can’t acquire the Twisted Sword. The Twisted Sword is (thus far) the strongest weapon in the game, and is especially strong against dark enemies like Titans, suggesting it may be critical in defeating them in a later chapter.
We don’t really know what any of this means right now! Fans are having mixed reactions: some are feeling cheated out of a full chapter of play (though with multiple save files they can still play Chapter 5 normally), while others (me!) are delighted and amused by the twist and subsequent anticipation. The whole thing is fueling tons of cool fan theories around what it will ultimately mean to try to defy Deltarune‘s prophecy, and whether or not the Weird Route is necessary for players to finally encounter Undertale‘s elusive scientist, W.D. Gaster.
We’ve got at least another year to go before Chapter 6, and even longer than that before we see the conclusion of the Weird Route, so let’s fuel those fan theories, folks!
