SweetieGames

Words can’t describe how excited I am for the next chapters of Deltarune to come out. I’ve been an UnderTale fan since 2016, with the game becoming one of my special interests. When chapter 2 released, I was moving into my new student house for my final year of university, and the sudden release motivated me to get all my stuff unpacked so I could devote as much time to playing before the semester started. So worth it.

When the announcement for chapter 3 and 4 dropped during the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct, I realised there wasn’t much time before we got the next instalments. This, alongside the official Deltarune newsletter, has spurred a wave of exciting new fan theories and connections to the upcoming chapters.

New pages were added to the Spamton Sweepstakes website, with the most recent newsletter encouraging players to take a look at it again. In case you are unaware, the Spamton Sweepstakes page was originally made in 2022 and was a fundraiser for Child’s Play, with new pieces of lore sprinkled in to the donation milestones as well as featuring exclusive prizes for donors. The page has sprung back to life to hold new lore titbits for people to craft their theories with.

Deltarune‘s creatorToby Fox has confirmed that the new content on this website (as well as the old content) isn’t necessarily canon, but it does give fans a great insight into the characters, their personalities as well as some assets that are going to be used in later chapters. I wish more games had something like this; it’s really brought the fanbase alive in the run-up to the release. For a short time, there was even a page where you could input your email address and you would receive an ominous email from an unknown character.

Fans are coming up with great ideas for how this content can link into canon events in the game itself further down the line. There’s plenty of audio files, clues and assets here that could definitely be seen in later chapters. The sprites of the characters in cowboy outfits is a prime example of this. Toby mentioned in a newsletter that this was at risk of being cut, but theorists such as SpookyDood on YouTube believe that this is all part of the plan. The cowboy themed sprites and a cowboy character whose show is “at risk from being cancelled” will show up in chapter 3 as a secret boss.

I can’t wait for the chapters to be out so more of this content can actually make sense. One of the pages that’s just been added has dancing cats on it that you click. At some random point, you get jumpscared by the grinning face that has been showing up rarely throughout chapter 2 and the Sweepstakes page, and it takes you back to the homepage. What’s going on? There’s also new webpages for each chapter up to 5, and they’re completely blank other than saying “applicable” or “not applicable”. Chapter 3’s page lets you hold down the left key for ages and the word “But…” will appear slowly off the edge of the screen. What does this mean?! What is applicable?! Why did that one page only accept email addresses for a short time? Why does /thepoorchildren lead to a page where I can draw things?

This is why fan theories are currently keeping the fandom thriving while we wait for the real answers. Watching people connect the dots, or coming up with ways to connect the dots yourself has been endlessly satisfying. Every theory feels wildly different and pays close attention to things we have (and haven’t) seen in the game. Fans are doing very well with what little information we have, and I’m excited to see how their theories will change for the end of the game once these new chapters have come out.

As infuriating as it is to not have the true answers right now, this is truly how you build hype for an upcoming game. Frustrate your players, make them question everything, make them pour over every line of dialogue, every piece of flavour text, every newsletter update, every meme webpage, every social media post to make sense of what’s going on. They’re fully invested, hanging on to your every word and every crumb of new content. And watch as they find out they were completely wrong (or right!) when the game launches. It’s beautiful. Bring on chapter 3 and 4 already!