Nightmare Fuel / Deltarune

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"Lost eternally in an endless night... Is that your idea of 'paradise'?"

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Just a fun, quirky, upbeat RPG about saving the world with your friends, right? WRONG, as Deltarune proves to be even more disturbing than Undertale.

General

• The main reason why the game is more disturbing than its predecessor is that Toby Fox mixed his usual meta-horror with realistic fears. These involve the original installation of the game, Kris' SOUL ripping, their relationship with Spamton, and the Snowgrave Route.
• The installation process before February 14th, 2019 already started to tip you off that something's not quite right with the game. Rather than a long Wall of Text of legal jargon that one would expect in the License Agreement, instead it's just a single line of text, and nothing else. It doesn't have a signature, so it is very likely that your firewall will try to stop you from opening it, and the fact that W.D. Gaster is implied to be responsible for the program doesn't make you feel any better. If it weren't Toby Fox we're talking about, one would think the game is actually a virus.
  YOU WILL ACCEPT EVERYTHING THAT WILL HAPPEN FROM NOW ON.
• Using your cell phone in the dark world plays a disturbing electronic screeching sound. In fact, it's "mus_smile", the same sound used in Gaster's unused Entry Number 17...
• In the town, there's a locked bunker which plays a strange sound when approached. Speeding up that noise by 666% reveals that it's the same sound used for Entry Number 17.
• Hidden in the game's JSON files, a set of dialogue can be found that isn't used in the game. It would seem someone is lost...^note Notably, this is virtually identical to what Flowey says during his memory flower in Waterfall.
  Where...
  Where am I?
  Hello...? Anyone...?
  Is... is anyone out there...?
  Someone?! Anyone?! Can anyone hear me?!
  ...
  It's dark.
  It's so dark in here.
  Someone, anyone, if you can hear me...
  Say something... please...
  • Chapter 2 adds more to this person's dialogue:
  No one can hear me, can they...?
  I guess not.
  To be honest, I'm not even sure if I can hear myself.
  It's so quiet here...
  ...and yet, sometimes,
  I swear I hear something...
  Something like... scratching?
• More hidden lines of failsafe text seem to describe the features of Undertale's "spr_mysteryman," commonly thought to be the true appearance of Gaster, and another line invokes his distinct font.
  Is that a cut on your face, or part of your eye?
  The gash weaves down as if you cry.
  The pain itself is reason why.

  You can't read these symbols...
  Or maybe it's the handwriting.

• Whenever most cutscenes end, Kris will turn to face the player if they're not already facing that way. While it can be seen as amusing if something funny happens, the fact that they still look right at you, as if they're waiting for you to decide what to do next, can be unsettling.
• There's something very... off about the Shadow Crystals that you receive from defeating the superboss in each chapter. The item description implies they are completely invisible, and are only identifiable by the shadows they cast... which are said to be moving. Seam implies the crystals have some sort of otherworldly power, but whatever this power is has yet to be revealed.
  • Notably, the two bosses that are in possession of the crystals (Jevil and Spamton) have a level of self-awareness and know much more about things than they should (Jevil is aware of the HP system and that everything is just a game, while Spamton is aware of Kris's SOUL and their lack of freedom). It's heavily implied this self-awareness is what caused both to completely lose any shred of sanity, and ostracized them from their friends. Just how powerful are these crystals?
  • Kris can use the crystals, which shows them a vision of the room they are currently in in the Light World. Use it again, and Kris will dismiss the item as useless. The fact that the crystals allow the user to see into the Light World raises some... disturbing implications about their original owners.
  • When in the Light World, the crystals remain in Kris's inventory as shards of glass. Using them when Kris is by themselves leads to the game describing Kris as being able to see through their own hand, as if the space below it doesn't exist. If Kris uses it when Susie is following them, they see Susie coldly glaring at them... then they look away and see Susie is actually smiling and jokingly making a rude hand gesture at them. The fact that this is never explained raises even more unsettling implications about just what Kris is collecting, and what it will amount to if they continue to do so.

Promotional Material

• The Talking Spamton plush has a chance of randomly yelling the mysterious muttering heard in the background of BIG SHOT. It's very unsettling.
• For the 7th anniversary of Undertale and the first anniversary of Deltarune Chapter 2, Toby organized the "SPAMTON $WEEPSTAKES", where Spamton temporarily takes over the Deltarune website and allows players to donate money for a chance to get merch. However, a new side of this was quickly discovered; numerous secret links throughout the site that take you to pages with pretty dramatic lore implications:
  • There's a link where you can see Noelle logging a sighting of the ICE-E cryptid. Said link has another link to her sister, December's, sighting of it. Except said page is completely dead. There's also a hidden "dess" page with a guitar that plays a version of "Lost Girl". Said version's file name is "findher".
  • The most shocking revelation comes in the "secret" page, an array of doors that the user can click on to be met with an image. Most of these are accompanied by unsettling grunts or cheers, accompanied by "You won!" or "you Lost!", but have harmless images like a Ralsei plush, a Pipis, a gumball machine, and a snapshot of the Wikipedia page for the Superbad website. All aside from a single image showing the sprite of a worn chair, accompanied by a "You won?". Clicking on it causes it to turn into an amorphous, pulsating black mass, accompanied by an ominous ambience—the same as that from the first few parts of the Waterfall map in Undertale. Dragging the image shows a very familiar image of yellow-and-pink eyes, one that specifically matches with the face seen in Spamton's basement. Those eyes can randomly pop into view with a creepy laugh when the chair is clicked, sending the viewer back to the main page. But the truly shocking part is the text that shows up on the tab.

    But what if it could

    (once the chair is clicked on) ...get darker than dark?

  • The "tv" page on the right side of the Green Room has the Dreemurr family's TV turned off in the dark. Nothing happens, but if you drag the TV's image into the adress bar and change the filename to "tv2.gif"◊, a crossed-out version of the TV appears. Why?...
  • The "Spamton Engraved Wedding Ring" has this in the description:

    IF YOU PROMISE ME YOUR [Heart-shapedObject] I CAN PROMISE YOU AN [HonestMan] WHO WILL ALWAYS BE THERE TO [SCREAM] [It hurts! It Hurts!]

    • Clicking the [It hurts! It Hurts!] link takes you to the aforementioned image of the crossed-out TV, and has text of Spamton ranting against someone, blaming him for all his problems. The URL reads "d_a_m_n_y_o_u_t_e_n_n_a" and tab reads "DELETE THIS!". But the revelation for this page comes in the final few lines:
      EVERYONE IS GOING TO PAY [5 easy payments of $9.99] UNTIL THEY'RE ALL IN THE [Disposal Area] BEGGING FOR MY [$#&*]!!!
      EVERYONE... EVERYONE EXCEPT...
      (in black text, shows up when highlighted) ... Mike...
    • Clicking on the crossed-out TV leads you to a page full of visual and aural white noise, mimicking a TV tuned to a dead channel, and a block of white text which reads as follows:
      WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE!?
      YOU SHOULDN'T BE HERE!!
    • Scrolling to the bottom and clicking takes you to the Green Room, but scrolling slightly up and clicking takes you to a bright blue room with scattered white pixels, accompanied by the sound of ocean waves. Clicking on the black door at the top takes you to another one of Noelle's blog posts, this one speaking about a mysterious door in Dragon Blazers that traps the player forever (allegedly a glitch), and later a locked door that doesn't open. The latter of which sounds pretty similar to the locked bunker in Hometown, as well as the mysteryman's place in Undertale.
  • The final "item" is just labeled "Spamton's fate". And unlike every other item up to this point, the flavor text is decidedly not written by Spamton. Instead, it's written by an unnamed individual who asks the viewer if they've become "sick of him", seems to dislike the attention he's getting and wants someone else in the spotlight, and asks the viewer to help them "buy Spamton's silence, permanently". While they offered another option to spare him, and "Survival" indeed won out, the Spamton Value Network stream ended with a sequence where the host, Spamton A. Spamton, was hunted down and killed in his stead.
  • The livestream announcing the winners for the Spamton Sweepstakes takes place on a Stylistic Suck 'shopping network' dedicated to entirely Spamton products. And by 'dedicated to Spamton', that means two people ^note Wayne and Baaulp from Radio TV Solutions, respectively in shitty cosplays of Spamton often pledging their allegiance (and money) to him as if he's a sort of deity. People have called it a sort of cult indoctrination video, and it's heavily implied the two were kidnapped and forced to do this. Mercifully, Toby confirmed the livestream to be non-canon before it aired.
    • There are two segments in the Spamton Value Network stream where an EarthBound-styled Spamton dubbed "Spamton Z. Spamton" appears. In the first, distorted music plays as he tells the audience to disable their antivirus before his head detaches from his body and flies off the screen. In the second, the music is replaced by repeating thuds. Spamton Z's face is completely blank, and a text box appears as if he's saying something, but there's nothing on it.
    • Early on in the stream is a 90s-styled commercial for the Spamton NutriNose, a sort of pipette shaped like Spamton's head that can quickly deliver food into anyone's mouth, accompanied by footage of a beautiful woman using the device and a demonstration of how it works. Despite the comedically nostalgic nature of the commercial, there are hints to a darker side; the commercial warns in big red text not to blow on the nozzle, tells the audience not to ask their doctors about it, and the disclaimer is a big wall of illegible text. Later in the stream, in a dark homage to the infamous "Burger King Pokémon Recall" PSAs, is a PSA telling anyone who has the NutriNose to immediately discard it as fatal explosions have been reported by use of it, along with two NutriNose in the same pose as the Poké Balls from that PSA.
    • At the end of the stream, the thin façade breaks down completely when the Fangamer team interrupts the broadcast, revealing that this wasn't actually their doing and the whole 'Spamton Value Network' was a hijack. Spamton A. Spamton panics and flees into the "real world", shaky cam following him as he runs through empty fields and to a payphone. Spamton A tries to call Spamton, pleading for him to pick up as the "Ode to Spamton" echoes louder and louder, and whatever's chasing him down gets him before he can reach Spamton. The last shot of the stream is of the dropped receiver, droning louder and louder until a Smash to Black. The End.
    MAY THE HYMN OF THE ANGELS SING THEE TO THY REST
    • After the livestream, Toby Fox stated that was the "normal" ending donators earned from voting for Spamton's "Freedom". There was a possibly worse alternate one recorded for the Silence outcome, which is left unknown.

Chapter 1

• The music that plays during the vessel creation is... unsettling. It also sounds like Giygas' theme.
  • Try entering in Gaster's name as your own name. It won't even let you finish entering it in before forcibly closing the game.
• Susie threatening to eat Kris's face, while sporting a Nightmare Face with Glowing Eyes of Doom and More Teeth than the Osmond Family. That's the very first true scare in the game... but far from the last.
• Upon reaching the closet, Kris and Susie are greeted by an unusually dark room that manages to frighten both of them. Then, when Kris and Susie enter and see that they can walk far deeper into it than normal, they decide to walk out... only for the door to slam shut, locking them in the pitch black. Susie tries to open the door to no avail, but then the floor gives way and they fall into a Bottomless Pit of darkness. It's definitely something straight out of a nightmare someone might have of being trapped in a dark place.
  • Like this Reddit post shows, this whole sequence perfectly fits with entry number 17.
• Your arrival in the Dark World is heralded by eerie silence, a gloomy atmosphere, and various bleak ruins. There isn't any melody to the music, just ambience in the background with dissonant notes, and strange creatures that react to your presence. Then you start finding eye-shaped markings in the stone walls, some of them bleeding darkness, and huge piles of dust. The mysterious figure that turns out to be Lancer trying to kill you is a relief from the tension and build up from a place so alien. There's nothing else like this in the areas you visit afterwards. And then we find out in Chapter 2 that those eye markings are identical to the Extra Eyes that appear on the Titans, meaning either this entire region was some sort of tribute to them, or the aftermath of something that happened involving the Titans, maybe from even the last time they awakened.
• Choosing not to continue after getting a Game Over causes the narrator to say a simple, but chilling line:
  THEN THE WORLD WAS COVERED IN DARKNESS.
  • As if it were not scary enough, a Lonely Piano Piece plays afterwards, then the game closes itself.
• The fight between Susie and Lancer, especially if you've grown to love the boy. You can't stop Susie from attacking him, as she does it on her own, and you can't even intentionally let Susie die, because Lancer will eventually deliberately miss the SOUL. By all accounts it looks like she's actually going to murder Lancer in cold blood, and you as the SOUL can't do anything to stop her. It's an immense relief when, at the last second, Susie deliberately misses, and it's revealed she just doesn't have the heart to follow through.
• The "Man Behind the Tree" Easter Egg is creepy by virtue of being Mind Screw incarnate. For one thing, it appears more or less randomly when moving between two specific rooms; the room itself is also extremely glitchy, allowing you to walk on the black space around the apparent ground. As for the Man himself, you never actually get to see him or hear his direct dialogue; you just hear the narrator refer to him (pointedly calling him "He", rather than "The man") as he gives you an egg, at which point the Man immediately disappears. The egg itself does not do anything until the end of the game, when you get the opportunity to put it in Asgore's fridge; examining the fridge will then reveal that there are now two eggs inside the fridge, meaning that either another one appeared from nowhere or that the pickle jar somehow turned into a second egg. Absolutely none of this is explained within the game itself.
  • The Man manifests in the Light World during Chapter 2 at the traffic jam if you place the first Egg. He simply greets Kris and disappears, but just what will happen as we keep collecting and placing those Eggs?
    "Looks like a car. There is even a man inside this one. He waves at you happily."
• Finding Jevil. Not only does one of the shopkeeps, Seam, freak out at the mere possibility of him escaping or anyone wanting to encounter him, but when you do finally meet the fellow, he's bat-shit insane and a bit of a Reality Warper. Even worse, until Spamton in the second chapter (who shares many similarities), he was one of the only cases in the entire series so far with mid-battle voice clips, almost as if he's "breaking the rules" thanks to his insanity and powers - not unlike Flowey.
  Jevil: Chaos, chaos!
  Jevil: I can do anything!
  • Just to add onto the Paranoia Fuel that the rest of the game's got going, Seam confesses that Jevil wasn't always like this. But after meeting a mysterious individual, Jevil came to see the world as nothing but a game and his mental state went off the deep end. During this exposition, Seam pointedly uses the phrase, "Darker, yet darker," a specific line attributed to Gaster through his Twitter account and previous hidden data.
  • There are also numerous implications that Jevil went on a rampage that spanned across not one, but multiple Dark Worlds. He says that he was locked up for trying to play game, which we know from his pre-fight intro that he uses it as a Deadly Euphemism. When discussing the Knight, Seam says that the Card Kingdom hasn't seen this much chaos since... something. There is also a reason for Jevil being locked up away from other prisoners, Spamton was scared of clowns before being driven insane^note Talking with a random Werewire NPC reveals that he kept petitioning for a public merry-go round, but "some ex-famous guy, some salesman-lobbyist type" kept it from happening due to his fear of clowns, and Tasque Manager knows Jevil well enough to recognize him from simply looking at the Devilsknife or Jevilstail. All of this implies there is a very good reason Jevil is The Dreaded and can't be recruited into Castle Town.
  • Right before his fight, Jevil states that, as soon as he's done with the Three Heroes, he will go on a killing spree using his game metaphors.
  Jevil: NOW WE CAN PLAY, PLAY! THEN, AFTER YOU, I CAN PLAY WITH EVERYONE ELSE, TOO!
• The King threatening harm towards Lancer. He had no remorse at all towards this, and based on other lines in the game, he was already known as a terrible father. Plus, the King striking and nearly killing the party as their guards are down. It's not until Chapter 2, a couple of real life years for some, that you can learn that he was bluffing in regards to Lancer and that he genuinely seems to care about him, but it doesn't make the scene any less chilling with that information.
• After returning from the Dark World, the player's dispensed into the unnamed town from the intro, filled with familiar faces from Undertale all around. Except Not as You Know Them. Alphys and Undyne have never met before (and Undyne isn't wearing her eyepatch), Bratty and Catty aren't friends and even seem to dislike each other, the Amalgamates are deceased (as is Gerson, one of the only people in the kingdom that had known about what the Deltarune was and Asgore and Toriel being Boss Monsters), there's a mysterious bunker south of town playing low sounds that one may not even realize are there, and even the people that know Kris outright call them a Creepy Child to their face with the implication that they're acting out-of-character currently. For those who haven't played the original game, it's just a cute exploration through a happy town full of friendly monsters. For those who have, there's a sense of dread and immense Paranoia Fuel, as if an itch in the back of your brain is telling you that something has gone horribly wrong, but don't know what.
• Chapter 1 ending. We skip to night time. Kris is asleep, tossing and turning in their bed. They become more and more fitful until they literally fling themself out of bed and onto the floor. They stand up, slouched over with their hair covering their face, and shuffle towards the door like a zombie. Then they plunge their hand into their chest and TEAR THEIR SOUL OUT OF THEIR BODY. They then fling it into the bird cage sitting at the side of the room (an astute player will notice that they can move the torn out SOUL while it is in the cage), shuffle back to the middle of the carpet, reveal a large knife, and slowly turn their head to the screen with blood red eyes and a Slasher Smile. In this state, they look like a teenager version of Chara.
  • Thankfully, the second chapter gives a lighthearted explanation for why Kris brandishes the knife, but that doesn't make the scene any less creepy, especially as Kris ripping out their SOUL, while happening a few other times in the second chapter, hasn't yet been explained. If you consider Kris' life in the Light World at this point (Susie's attempted murder, their reputation as the other reindeer, and the dissociation that results), the SOUL ripping looks like they're harming themselves out of self-hatred.

• Chapter 2

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IT APPEARS YOU HAVE REACHED
AN END.
WILL YOU TRY AGAIN?