I’m swimming in incredible games to play right now. I just finished Titanium Court, I’ve got Tethergeist waiting for me on my Switch, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is out tomorrow, Mina the Hollower and The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time are next week, and that’s if I can tear myself away from Forza Horizon 6. Rolling into the summer, I’m looking forward to Rhythm Heaven Groove, Splatoon Raiders, The Adventures of Elliot, Beast of Reincarnation, Grave Seasons, TOEM 2, and probably another major World of Warcraft patch that will drag me back to raiding.
But there’s one summer game I’m looking forward to that will instantly cause me to forget all the others. A game I will drop everything for. A game that is coming, surely, but that doesn’t yet have a release date just yet.
It’s Deltarune Chapter 5, bay-bee!
Yes, hello, it is I, avowed Deltarune sicko. I love this absurd game. It’s an episodic adventure by Toby Fox and team, billed as a game “for players who completed Undertale” yet not exactly a sequel as far as we can tell so far. Its first chapter was released way back in 2018 as a surprise, free demo dropped out of nowhere and disguised at the time as a “SURVEY PROGRAM.” Since then, it’s gotten three more chapters, two of which were released together last year. Chapters 3 and 4 were incredible, doing a lot to flesh out what this game is actually about and what the main characters are all trying to accomplish, and 4 ended on a pretty major cliffhanger. So naturally, we’re all eager for Chapter 5, which Fox has assured us will come out sometime in 2026.
Maybe I sound a little wacky putting this much thought into the release date of one chapter of an indie game but, guys, Deltarune is really, really good. Describing its basic plot and mechanics (turn-based bullet hell RPG about two misunderstood teens who fall into a dark world of monsters and magic and meet a magic goat and together they have to save both worlds from endless darkness) does absolutely nothing to get at why people love it so much. I think at least some of the magic has been in the wait for each chapter: Fox is an excellent writer, and he’s made us fall in love with the cast of weirdos populating this little game. So in the true spirit of fandom, the long months and years between releases have been filled with fan art, music, and rampant speculation about what’s going to happen, to whom, and why. I’ve wasted hours on Reddit reading up on theories about everything from a mysterious character we haven’t really seen yet named “December,” to whether or not the Sans in this game is the same guy as the one in Undertale, to why several of the song titles in the soundtrack are in all caps. And by now, nearly a year after Chapter 3 and 4 dropped, fans think they’ve pieced together the basic shape of what Chapter 5 will be: where its Dark World will appear, who the major boss will be, and who the mysterious Knight making all the Dark Fountains is. Of course, half of the theories are probably totally wrong, but that’s part of the fun of it.
So why is this a “summer” game, despite being listed as simply coming in “2026,” and despite Fox predicting back in September that it would probably be in the second half of the year? Well, a lot of the Deltarune fan community seems to expect it sometime around June, July, or August, and that speculation is fueled by Fox’s recent development updates…and maybe a bit of optimism. Fox posted on Bluesky two months ago saying that professional testers would begin formally testing the game on April 1, and that “most of the development team has moved on from Chapter 5.”
“The actual testing period will last for an indefinite amount of time,” he continued. “After that, the game needs to get approved on consoles and we need to do various other things to prepare for release. ”
How long does it take to test Deltarune Chapter 5, get console approval, and do “various other things”? No idea. Deltarune is a weird game, and if Chapter 5 is anything like the others, a lot of what goes on for any given player will be dependent on certain things having been accomplished in prior chapters, meaning there are probably a lot of different permutations of the game for testers to try to break on top of all its rooms, encounters, dialogues, and whatnot. But given the pace of things so far, a lot of fans are hoping that three, four, or five months is a reasonable amount of time, and that we might get the release sometime this summer. Especially since June 5 will mark the one-year anniversary of 3+4’s release. Personally, I don’t think we’ll see Deltarune Chapter 5 in June, but July or August feels extremely plausible to me. I could even see us getting a trailer with a firm date at one of the many showcases around Summer Game Fest.
I do feel safe in saying that this will be like Fox’s other releases: he won’t say anything about a date until he’s confident the game is ready, and it will likely launch a very short period of time after i’ts announced. You can bet that the second it’s available I will be dropping every single task on my to-do list, every social obligation and whatever it is Ethan’s told me to do that day (sorry), shutting off social media, and playing Chapter 5 from start to finish. I’m looking forward to that, and I’m weirdly also looking forward to what will surely be another long wait after Chapter 5 for Chapter 6, and beyond.
