For this critical play, I completed the first chapter of Deltarune, a retro-styled indie RPG and Undertale’s sister game. Deltarune is currently in development by Toby Fox, with Chapter 1 releasing in 2018 and the most recent chapters released in 2025. For this critique, I played Deltarune on PC, but the game is also available on all major consoles.
This game is intended for those who have already completed Undertale, as many of the game’s narrative elements and characters rely on an understanding of that game. Deltarune’s world follows similar conventions to Undertale, with the two main species being humans and monsters. In Deltarune, you play as Kris, the only human living in an all-monster town. Most of the game is spent in the “Dark World,” a bizarre realm where everyday objects are given will and form by a “Dark Fountain.” However, I personally found the town itself to be where the richest world-building occurs in this game, and I found myself intrigued with how the world-building directly contributes to the player’s understanding and empathy towards Kris’ characterization.
Isolation and alienation in a place where you are not welcome hurts, but feeling isolation in a place where you are welcome, where you should fit in, hurts far more because then, the common denominator is you. It feels like there’s some crucial, unchangeable defect with you that prevents you from being accepted. I believe that this feeling is the struggle that Toby aims to convey through Kris, and it is a highly difficult and complex struggle to convey in a game. However, I believe Deltarune masterfully navigates this by using embedded narratives and architecture to make the world feel explicitly warm and inclusive, and then contrasting that with character interactions that highlight Kris’ alienation from their community.
First, Deltarune creates a sense of familiarity, by emphasizing that there is nothing fantastical about this town, other than the fact that it is populated by monsters. The architecture is one of the key elements that creates a sense of familiarity. The architecture is evocative, most notably of the most stereotypical model of a small, suburban town. The establishments – like a homey diner, school, library, police station – are staples of a small suburban town, and the set pieces inside of them are also exactly what we would expect from our mental model of a human world. Socially and culturally, the world is also highly reminiscent of our own. The occupations remain largely the same, and even the other students in the class mirror high-school archetypes (jocks, emos, nerds, etc.)
Interacting with the monsters, there doesn’t seem to be much intentional exclusion or discrimination happening either. Humans are clearly not a foreign concept to monsters in this world and nobody really brings it up as something of note. In fact, most monsters in the town are incredibly friendly to you.
Even so, the dialogue reveals a strong embedded narrative of Kris’ history of isolation. One of the strongest ways this is done is by creating a stark contrast to how the town views Kris and their monster brother, Asriel.
Nearly every single monster has a dialogue option where you can prompt them to talk about Asriel, and these characters almost always have loving things to say about him. Not one character, with the exception of your adopted mother Toriel, has a dialogue option to talk about yourself, almost as if nobody even has anything to say about you. Through this, the player can infer that Asriel is the town favorite, a person who fully belongs in the community. The fact that Kris and Asriel are from the same family and upbringing, yet Kris was never loved by the community to the same degree conveys the emotion of feeling defective and allows the player to empathize with Kris’ struggles.
Architecture in your shared room emphasizes the disparity between how well Asriel fits in vs. Kris.
An aspect of worldbuilding not present in the game that I feel would strengthen Kris’ characterization even more are narrative bits scattered about the town providing context on what exactly the cultural relationship between humans and monsters is in this world. Having this context gives a reference point with which to compare Kris’ own relationship with monsters. For example, if a book at the library could give a quick snippet that humans and monsters are completely friendly and accepting of each other in this world, then we as a player can better understand why not feeling accepted by the town makes Kris feel like something is wrong with themselves. Not having does invite the joy of making inferences and headcanons, but I do feel that it misses an opportunity to strengthen Kris’ characterization even further.
An ethical shortcoming of Deltarune’s worldbuilding is that the sense of familiarity created by the town and its residents references specifically the tropes of an American suburban town. Toby Fox is American, so the town was likely modeled after his own upbringing and understanding of pop-culture, and for an American audience, the town achieves its goal wonderfully. However, Deltarune also has a substantial global audience, who likely don’t share the same understanding of American cultural references. For these players, the conveyance of Kris’ alienation is substantially weaker, since the narrative elements that create the sense of alienation don’t have the contrast point of the familiar town. However, trying to create a highly generic town setting that tries to create familiarity for players of all different cultures risks not creating it well for any of them.
