For this week’s worldbuilding Critical Play, I played the much-beloved Deltarune: Chapter 3. Toby Fox has always been a fantastic worldbuilder in my eyes, so I was very excited to be able to save this playthrough for a topic like this.
Deltarune is a top-down, narrative-heavy JRPG-like game, geared towards an audience of teenagers and older While Deltarune provides a slowly-building, general set of lore for the entire game, much of its magic is in the fact that each chapter builds an entirely new world for the player to discover and navigate. Each chapter features its own set of unique characters, a unique setting, an accompanying soundtrack, and most importantly one central theme for the player to base their expectations on. Deltarune relies heavily upon genre cliches to help the player quickly immerse themselves in the world they are playing – and while it may often be problematic to make the architecture and characters of a world fit strongly to a stereotype, I argue Deltarune does it in a positive and beneficial way.
Deltarune: Chapter 3 is centered around the cable television esthetic – featuring an energetic TV host who guides the player’s party through game shows, cooking challenges, quizzes, and more related trials and tribulations. As we interact, our actions are cheered on by the host and an unseen “live audience”. We battle a sun and rain themed weather reporting couple. We fight for the highest ranking so our audience does not “turn the dial” to another station.
The player lives in a literal TV world, where all aspects of the sights and sounds around them are dictated by this central theme. While these evocative spaces (see “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” by Henry Jenkins) set player expectations quickly, allowing them to familiarize themselves with the plot and setting, applying these cliches to character design can often lead to accidental caricatures that can be diminutive and reductionist to certain peoples and cultures. Deltarune, however, avoids this pitfall by creatively taking these personifications to an even deeper extreme. As mentioned above, our TV host is a literal walking, talking television-headed person – dubbed “Mr. (Ant) Tenna”. Toby Fox removes the potential for displacing cultural misperceptions onto a character by simply personifying their themed role so much, they lose much of what even makes them a recognizable “person”. The weather reporting couple we battle, rather than being the stereotypically “pretty” Caucasian news couple we often see in media, is instead a moon man with sunglasses and a raincloud-headed reporter. Deltarune shows us how cliches can still be cleverly implemented into character designs to support a theme, without having to rely on reducing cultures and the people thereof.
Deltarune similarly takes advantage of cliches in more than just character design – extending its theme to nearly all aspects of the world its chapter creates. In its architectural design, for example, Chapter 3 employs many of the “secondary functions” of video game architecture, as described in Ernest Adams’ “Designer’s Notebook: The Role of Architecture in Videogames.” We see the concepts of “familiarity” and “architectural cliches” heavily used, helping the player not just quickly absorb the theme of the chapter, but quickly discern the challenges they will face and the solutions to them.
When the player’s party faces a quiz challenge, they similarly are brought into an environment with the same podiums, stage, and big blue quiz boards we see on real shows like Jeopardy or Family Feud. When the player must solve a cooking challenge, we are brought into a kitchen with our players suddenly clothed in aprons and with cooking gear; even the stage is arranged in a way reminiscent of cooking challenge/elimination shows. While it can be argued that choosing the theme of gameshows pins us into the area of not being problematic, that there is little opportunity to introduce racist caricatures or reductionist actions, that is precisely the creative and intelligent choice that Toby Fox chose. We as game designers get to narrow our problem space to make design decisions easier for us. We can choose worlds that are less prone to lending themselves into hurtful interpretations.
Deltarune: Chapter 3 charmingly immerses its players in a world entirely encompassed by a central theme. The enemies and NPCs faced, the architecture seen, and the challenges navigated all both rely upon and build up the chapter’s thematic cliché. Yet, by implementing creative solutions to this uber-theme, Toby Fox is able to avoid the potentially problematic or reductionist pitfalls that other game designers have faced when doing the same. By personifying characters so deeply into their theme that they shed identifying cultural traits that can be tied to real cultures, we can avoid being reductionist. By choosing a theme that itself is not a central and reductionist narrative to a larger culture ensures we can borrow architectural elements and framings without alluding to the peoples thereof. Deltarune is a fresh reminder that we can still help players immerse themselves into a deeply thematic world without being hurtful.
